Florida Sues Healthcare Company It Overpaid By $5 Million

The state of Florida recently sued a healthcare services company after it overpaid the company $5 million due to a decimal error on the invoice. The company took the overpayment and the then CEO later loaned herself millions of dollars to successfully run for Congress.

Inside Elections’s editor Jacob Rubashkin commented on the wild story this week and wrote, “Holy cow! Florida says it accidentally paid a healthcare company $5.7 million instead of $50k. That company’s CEO, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, then loaned herself $6.2 million to win a congressional race.”

Local media in Tallahassee first reported on the lawsuit from the state, writing:

According to a lawsuit filed recently, Florida’s Division of Emergency Management (FDEM) entered into a deal in 2021 with South Florida’s Trinity Health Care Services to register people for COVID-19 vaccinations. And that June, FDEM meant to pay Trinity an invoice amount of $50,578.50.

But the state instead accidentally paid $5,057,850.00 to Trinity, an overage of five million bucks.

“Trinity took advantage of the state of emergency the entire country was encountering due to the COVID-19 pandemic and knowingly processed an invoice more than 100 times its typical invoice size,” alleges the state of Florida in its court filing.

Florida is suing Trinity for damages, interest, attorney’s fees, and other relief, according to the lawsuit, which argues that the company “was required to return any overpayments of invoices for work not actually performed and money not actually owed.”

Rubashkin dug in further on Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick’s (D-FL) potential role in all of this. “I’ve been reporting on Cherfilus-McCormick’s murky financial arrangements for years. A recent Office of Congressional Ethics report confirmed much of that work,” he wrote on X, adding:

This lawsuit could help explain how SCM went from reporting <$100k income to making millions.

The source of her sudden wealth has been one of the big mysteries in this whole saga. Here the OCE report details the drastic change from her $86,000 salary in 2020 to a $5.7 million paycheck from her healthcare company in 2021.

Cherfilus-McCormick is under a separate investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), an independent watchdog group, over her alleged misuse of campaign funds.

The Hill reported earlier in the month that “the OCE said Cherfilus-McCormick may have made “impermissible payments” to a state PAC that then paid various vendors and her unofficial campaign manager, who was allegedly “heavily involved” in the production of franked communications from her congressional office but was not compensated with official funds.”