The city of Riviera Beach has continued to pay the insurance for about 100 former employees, according to City Councilwoman KaShamba Miller-Anderson.
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“I thought it was absolutely insane,” Miller-Anderson said on Tuesday.
Miller-Anderson said some employees received insurance three to four years after their employment ended, costing the city over $1 million in taxpayer money.
“I’ve never heard of an employee, who no longer works for an employer, to continue to receive insurance,” Miller-Anderson said. “That should have never happened.”
But it happened and now the question is how?
“I have requested some documents,” Miller-Anderson said. “It’s slowly coming in.”
The mistake first came to light during a 2017 audit. The investigation into what exactly happened was in full swing when then-City Manager Jonathan Evans was abruptly fired on Sept. 20.
The results of the audit never reached council until a resident brought it up during a recent City Council meeting.
“I was shocked,” Miller-Anderson said.
Now she’s trying to get to the bottom of what went wrong.
“I’m having difficulty getting information from my city manager and her staff,” Miller-Anderson said. “I don’t know why, because we want to be very transparent. We don’t have anything to hide than we need to reveal what is going on so that it doesn’t appear that something is going on that shouldn’t be going on.”
She said safeguards have since been put in place to make sure this won’t happen again.
