The contractor who runs the Affordable Care Act application processing facility in Wentzville paid more than 13,000 hours of overtime to catch up with a backlog created by computer problems after the initial sign-up period, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
From May 1 through Aug. 15 last year, workers in the Wentzville facility logged 13,228.25 hours of overtime to process “backlogged inconsistency work,” according to a report by Serco Inc., the contractor running the facility for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS.
CMS spokesman Aaron Albright said the cost of that overtime was covered under the original contract with Serco at no extra cost to taxpayers.
Serco, a British-based company with U.S. headquarters in Northern Virginia, was awarded a five-year contract, worth up to $1.2 billion, to process applications for the Affordable Care Act. It was paid $114 million for the first year of the contract and $98 million for the current year, with annual renewal options.
The Post-Dispatch filed Freedom of Information Act requests after whistleblower allegations that workers in Wentzville were playing games, reading or purposely working slowly because they had so little to do.
In a Feb. 10, 2015, report sent to CMS, Serco’s Jon P. Lau and Carlo Uchello addressed those allegations. They attributed the slow-downs to computer problems but said they took the allegations of worker loafing seriously and began extensive retraining so workers could do other tasks.
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