Schoharie County looks to have over-paid its health insurance by $1.5 million in 2024, Finance Committee chair Alex Luniewski said Thursday, and now supervisors are demanding answers from the County Treasurer.
The questioned discrepancy between what was budgeted and what was paid out appears to be because of how the county’s $1.2 million Tyler Munis Financial System is being used, and in two resolutions passed unanimously, supervisors have set a January 31 deadline for a “written detail[ed] explanation of the status of the Health Insurance accounts and reconciliation,” from County Treasurer Mary Ann Wollaber-Bryan.
They’ve also given the Treasurer’s Office until January 31 to “commence automated weekly financial reconciliation and provide the County Administrator and the Finance Committee with a report on all cleared and uncleared transactions.”
Mr. Luniewski told supervisors the county budgeted $8.8 million for health insurance in 2024 and in December, he got a phone call that they “were off by $3.5 million.
“They can account for some of it, not all of it,” he said.
At December’s Board of Supervisors’ meeting, supervisors agreed to transfer $1 million to cover the balance, Mr. Luniewski said, but Thursday, he said he learned on New Year’s Eve that “we’re still $1.5 million off. A million that we budgeted for. A million and a half is a large amount of money. No one can tell me where it is.”
Outgoing County Administrator Korsah Akumfi told supervisors Thursday that he wasn’t made aware of the discrepancy until he reached out to the Treasurer’s Office and learned they’d “overspent” the health insurance account by $3.5 million.
“Yes, I’m the County Administrator,” he said, “but I wasn’t given any information until I asked the question. I was told it had to do with reconciliation.”
“How much have we paid for insurance? Have we underpaid? Have we overpaid?” Mr. Luniewski said Friday.
“I don’t know. We don’t know. And we can’t prove anything because our checks”—as many as 8,500 of them—“aren’t being reconciled.”
“As 16 members of this board, we have a responsibility to every taxpayer, to every dollar that comes into this building,” he said. “And we don’t know where it is. We can’t account for that money. Shame on us.”
Monday, Ms. Wollaber-Bryan said yes, they’re behind on reconciling—in part because they’re understaffed, but also because of the demands of learning and implementing the new, often-unwieldy, financial system.
Much of the discrepancy comes because Tyler was making payments automatically while her staff was making the same payments manually, she said; that accounts for about $2.5 million.
Once they’ve reconciled the accounts, Ms. Wollaber-Bryan said she expects another $500-$600,000 to “come back,” leaving “at the end of the day, maybe only $500,000 that we need to take a look at…[asking] “Is that because insurance costs are up? Are people using it more?”
Ms. Wollaber-Bryan said she called Mr. Luniewski as soon as she realized there was a problem; the $1 million moved in December was “just to be safe.”
“Nothing’s missing. Nothing’s going on,” she said. “No one here has been anything but cooperative.”