LITTLE ROCK (AP) — An Arkansas Department of Human Services official said the agency didn't award a new contract to build the state's Medicaid eligibility and enrollment system due to a paperwork error.
State officials believed they had reached an agreement with North Dakota company Noridian Healthcare Solutions for the project, said Dick Wyatt, chief information officer with the department's office of systems and technology.
But he told lawmakers on Thursday that Noridian later said that it wasn't aware of certain project requirements, so he notified the company on Feb. 12, 2013, that the department was dropping its negotiations, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (http://bit.ly/1SQRZWG ) reported.
Wyatt said he learned the next day that the department wouldn't be able to negotiate with another company for the work. He said a document awarding the contract in 2012 to the company was "final," barring the state from awarding the contract to another company.
The Department of Finance and Administration's Office of State Procurement "had prepared the wrong document, and sent it to Noridian, and that precluded us from stepping down" and negotiating with other bidders, Wyatt said.
Facing an Oct. 1, 2013, deadline to begin enrollment using the system, department officials opted to build it through an existing contract for technology services available to all state agencies.
Under that contract, the Human Services Department paid companies for the workers' time and materials, rather than for meeting specific goals. Enrollment through the system began on time, but the lack of performance measures in the staffing contracts has been blamed for missed deadlines and high costs.
The department is replacing the 25-year-old system it uses to sign up Arkansas residents for Medicaid and food-stamp benefits because of eligibility rules, which were created by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and became effective in January 2014. The older system isn't able to determine eligibility under the new rules.