Delta Dental CEO says state personnel director Joe D'Alessandro sought payment for Benson 'volunteer' Linda Pepin for her work on the state's dental contract.
NHPR's series on Linda Pepin and the Choicelinx contract earned a 2004 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Radio Investigative Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists.
The volunteer in this case, Governor Benson's special healthcare adviser Linda Pepin, was dealing with two insurance companies on behalf of the state. By law, Pepin could not be paid for this work without a license. She didn't have one. It is now clear that state personnel director Joe D'Alessandro, went out of his way to find a method to pay Pepin. D'Allesandro is Pepin's former business partner, and like Pepin, was a former executive Craig Benson's company Cabletron. On two occasions, D'Alessandro asked Northeast Delta Dental representatives if they could pay Linda Pepin for the work she did on the state's dental contract. That's from Tom Raffio, Delta Dental's CEO. Raffio says the overtures took place last March.
"The question was asked 'How can you pay Linda, who's been working on the account?' And we basically said, 'If we were to pay as a commission she has to be first of all have to be the broker of record, and second of all licensed as a broker' and we kind of left it at that."
But to hear Raffio tell it, Joe D'Alessandro did not leave it at that. Delta Dental rejected D'Alessando's proposal on March 20th.
"Shortly thereafter we got a letter March 24th, from Joe D'Alessandro basically saying that effective retroactively to March 1st or 15th, Dennis French would be the broker of record."
Upon becoming the state's insurance broker, Dennis French promptly tapped Linda Pepin to be his paid consultant. From that point forward, all brokers fees for the state's health and dental plans, were split three ways, among French, Pepin and a third broker. For his part, Joe D'Alessandro refused comment on this story, but the embattled personnel director did say this much in an interview last November.
"We know that Linda Pepin was getting brokers fees."
"Uh-huh."
"And she's not a broker, so she would not be entitled to get those."
"Well she wasn't getting brokers fees. She was part of a cons- I'm not going to get into that, but we do not have brokers anymore. We are dissolving all of them in the state, because the account was just getting too big."
Under the state health and dental contracts, the broker's fees totaled about $22,000 a month. State Administrative Services Commissioner Don Hill confirms that number, and also that the payment of all brokers fees ended in November. Commissioner Hill, whose department oversees personnel, adds that he was never aware D'Alessandro's used his state position to try to get Delta Dental to hire Linda Pepin.
"I knew nothing about that. And had no knowledge and did not know it was going on."
"And if it did go on it's obviously not appropriate conduct."
"I wouldn't believe that would be appropriate. But I'll have to say that in this situation I'll have to say I have no comment because this whole situation is under investigation by the Attorney General's office."
The man who pressed D'Alessandro and Pepin into state service, Governor Craig Benson, also says the Delta Dental situation was news to him. When asked if he felt in any way responsible for the actions of his longtime associates, the Governor declined a direct reply.
"This is under review so I don?t know the details of it and it's the first I heard of anything like that. So I hope the attorney general gets to the bottom of all these things and we iron it out and move forward and that's that."
The state investigations now underway -- one by the Attorney General and another by the insurance department - continue. People close to the investigations expect the probes to be completed by the end of the month.
For NHPR News, I'm Josh Rogers.
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