What’s Your Worst Workplace Blunder?

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In my last gig before retirement, I was a data analyst for a company that had a bevy of contracts with state Medicaid agencies. Our job was to find Medicaid recipients who also had private health insurance. Medicaid agencies would use this information to deny claims and direct healthcare providers to the appropriate private insurer for the payments they were due.

One of the state Medicaid contracts I had was Kentucky. Every quarter I would get the Tricare enrollment file for Kentucky from the federal government. I would then compare the Tricare enrollment file with Kentucky’s Medicaid enrollment file. If I found a Medicaid recipient who had Tricare insurance that the state didn’t know about, that was considered an “add” and my company was awarded $30. If I found a Medicaid recipient who had Tricare insurance that the state knew about and the term of that Tricare coverage had changed, that was considered an “update” and my company was awarded $10. The quarterly comparison between the Tricare enrollment file and the Medicaid enrollment file typically generated a little over $200,000 in revenue for my company.

One fourth quarter, either in 2011 or 2012, the Tricare file came late and I got bogged down by the Medicaid contracts for the states of Louisiana and Florida. So I, truth be told, forgot to process the file before the calendar year concluded. And that normally isn’t a big deal. There was no requirement to process the Tricare file within a certain number of days after its delivery, and if it weren’t processed at all, the next Tricare file would yield even more revenue for my company (for that quarter anyway). The only problem was that our contract with Kentucky Medicaid concluded on December 31. We lost the renewal contract to a competitor. My absentmindedness thus cost my company over $200,000 in revenue.

The only good news regarding my gross incompetence was that no one discovered it. My former manager, who was sharp as hell and would have surely pounced on my negligence, moved up the corporate ladder some six to nine months earlier and was no longer holding the hand of his replacement. His replacement, in turn, my new manager, was understandably overwhelmed. Cost avoidance contracts with state Medicaid agencies aren’t simple. They’re scores of pages long with lots of sections, sub-sections, and sub-sub-sections. New managers need one to two years to master the intricacies of any contract they’re assigned. My new manager, who was just as sharp as my old manager, was thus a victim of timing. In addition to learning the ins-and-outs of the Kentucky contract, she also had to learn the ins-and-outs of two other state Medicaid contracts (I believe they were Tennessee and Alabama). And, then, long before she could have possibly mastered the intricacies of these three contracts, the Kentucky contract was lost to a competitor. She simply didn’t know enough about the Kentucky contract to make sure I exploited every revenue-producing lever it had before it expired.

So I skated on a $200,000 blunder. No boss person unearthed it, no accounting controls were in place to detect it, and I, to my eternal shame, kept my mouth shut about it. I didn’t want to tarnish my guru status and jeopardize my annual bonus. What’s your worst workplace blunder?