“It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.” – John Wooden
As I mentioned in a previous post, early communication with your employees is critical to the success of a dependent eligibility audit.
Today’s news brought an example of what can happen if this early communication isn’t carefully considered. The State of New Jersey is in the early stages of a dependent verification project performed by a large consulting firm. The State’s largest paper reported today that the project is drawing early criticism because of the mishandling of some of the early communications.
“Several public employee representatives who serve on the commission criticized how the state, which has sent out about 25,000 letters so far, has gone about conducting the audits.
They said public employees were suspicious of the audit letters they began receiving at the end of last month, because they did not recognize the name of the consultant that had sent out the mailings, an actuarial and benefits management firm known as AON.
Some employees had security concerns, thinking the requests for documentation were phony, while others threw out the letters as junk mail.” Read the entire article…
Even though the letters have only been sent to 10% of the population thus far, it shows how important it is to follow the best practices of communicating with employees from day one.
We advise our clients to make sure that the early communications are co-branded with your organization’s logo and the logo of your vendor. It has been a process that we have followed for the last five years without incident. We also recommend introducing the company very early in the process with newsletters, postings on bulletin boards, etc.
As you consider which vendor you are going to use for your dependent verification project, make sure you pay attention to the vendor’s specific experience in conducting these audits…and pay very close attention to how they handle the details.
