Shame on the LGC.

My good friend and colleague Jon Gelman posted this recent piece of news on his blog the other week:

A New Hampshire insurance group has been charged by the State with improperly appropriating millions of dollars of taxpayers’ funds to a workers’ compensation insurance plan. The improper allocation is described in a petition filed by the State.

To provide a bit more detail, the amount of misappropriated funds is actually estimated at upward of $100 million. The Local Government Center of New Hampshire, or LGC, is a non-government, non-profit organization that provides a range of services to municipal governments. LGC is an umbrella organization with subsidiaries that offer services in areas such as finance, personnel, and legal. They also provide a range of insurance programs that municipalities and their employees may buy into.

In this case, the municipal employees thought that they were paying for LGC’s HealthTrust and Property-Liability insurance programs. Instead LGC used the funds to pay for a completely separate workers’’ compensation insurance program.

LGC asserts that they did nothing inappropriate, even though what they did is clearly illegal and they used some very tricky tactics to circumvent the law. One wonders what kind of gross mismanagement of people’s money led LGC to do this. Clearly neither government contractors nor non-profit organizations are exempt from fraudulent behavior.

If you are interested in seeing the New Hampshire Secretary of State hearings, including audio recordings, visit this page.