A legislative committee voted Wednesday to subpoena a federal official to testify about the rocky implementation of Arkansas' Medicaid eligibility and enrollment system.
The unanimous vote by the Joint Performance Review Committee came after its chairman, Rep. Kim Hammer, acknowledged that the committee had no authority to enforce the subpoena outside Arkansas' borders.
But Hammer said the subpoena is the "strongest message that we can send" to Jessica Kahn, director of the data and systems group within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Center for Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program Services.
The legislative committee has been investigating the reasons the enrollment system's implementation has taken months longer than expected while its projected cost has more than doubled, to about $200 million.
Hammer said he has sent Kahn "numerous requests" for her to provide information and testify before the committee.
So far, he said, her only response has been a two-sentence email that she sent July 13 to an analyst with the state Bureau of Legislative Research.
On behalf of Hammer, the analyst had asked Kahn to respond to a list of difficulties that state Department of Human Services officials said they encountered in dealing with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on the enrollment-system project.
"Received and reviewing. Thank you," Kahn wrote in her response.
An Arkansas Democrat-Gazette email to Kahn on Wednesday asking how she plans to respond to the subpoena was referred to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman Aaron Albright.
Albright didn't say how Kahn or the agency plans to respond to the subpoena.
Hammer said he wants to know why the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services hasn't exercised better control over the project.
He said he also wants to get the agency's responses to statements by Human Services Department officials.
"CMS has been consistently thrown under the bus in this process," he said.
Emails obtained by the committee and by the Democrat-Gazette, under an open-records request, show that Kahn expressed concerns about the project in February.
In a Feb. 24 email to Arkansas Medicaid Director Dawn Stehle, Kahn said she was "very concerned" that state officials had replaced EngagePoint, the lead company on the project, without formally notifying the federal agency.
State officials replaced Calverton, Md.-based EngagePoint with Princeton, N.J.-based eSystems.
A response to Kahn from the Human Services Department said the lack of notification was due to an oversight by Richard Wyatt, chief information officer with the Human Services Department's office of systems and technology.
Hammer said he had also planned to ask that subpoenas be issued to executives with Falls Church, Va.-based Northrop Grumman and Fargo, N.D.-based Noridian Healthcare Solutions.
But executives with those companies recently agreed to voluntarily testify, Hammer said.
Both companies bid in 2012 for the contract to install the enrollment system.
Noridian won the bid for the project, but state officials were unable to agree on the terms of a contract with the company.
Instead of turning to Northrop Grumman, the second-ranked bidder, officials decided to hire workers using an existing contract for technology services available to all state agencies.
Under that contract, the Human Services Department pays companies for workers' time and materials, rather than for meeting specific goals.
Wyatt has said state procurement officials told him he could not negotiate with Northrop Grumman because the state sent the wrong document notifying Noridian that it had been selected as winning bidder.
Jane Benton, the state's former procurement director, told the legislative committee last week that the error wouldn't have prevented the Human Services Department from negotiating with Northrop Grumman.
But officials didn't have time for more negotiations because they faced an Oct. 1, 2013, deadline to begin enrollment using the new system, she said.
Metro on 09/17/2015