Hogansville fails to pay premiums

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, September 2, 2015

By James Morton

jmorton@civitasmedia.com

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HOGANSVILLE — On Aug. 20, several Hogansville employees received a notice by mail from Aflac stating their premiums had not been paid by the city.

According to James Woods, Hogansville city manager, there were no lapses in coverage and no claims denied during the 90 days the payments were deliquent.

Woods said that his office became aware of the situation on Friday after employees brought the letter to his attention. His office got on the phone with an Aflac representative and resolved the issue.

“We fixed it. We got on the phone and fixed it. Nobody’s out of coverage as far as I can tell,” Woods said.

According to Woods, a computer bug in the software used to manage city finances is mostly likely to blame, although he would not rule out human error or “something else.” He said that in the past three years there have been four instances of these types of errors.

Woods said the City will now put in place redundancies to ensure that the error will not happen again if the error was human-related. Some of those new systems will be reoccurring computer calendar reminders for the due date of the invoice.

“The bottom line is, we made a mistake,” Woods said. “We fixed it immediately. No one lost any benefits. No one was denied any benefits, and steps have been put in place to ensure that it doesn’t happen again in the future.”

Twenty-six of the 57 Hogansville employees have policies with Aflac.

James Morton is a reporter at LaGrange Daily News. He may be reached at 706-884-7311, ext. 2154.