
The South Florida-based health care company the state is suing to recover $5.8 million in alleged overpayments said in a court filing Tuesday that the state waited three years to raise the issue — and then ignored the company’s response.
Months later, the state filed a lawsuit against Trinity Health Care Services to get back the money it says it was owed. The state claimed that Trinity was refusing to repay the money.
Trinity, in its response, described a different scenario.
The lawsuit, filed Dec. 30 by the state Division of Emergency Management, received an extra dose of public attention because the company’s former CEO is Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who is now a Broward-Palm Beach County member of Congress.
The state’s complaint and Trinity’s response agree on some basic facts: In 2021, the Florida Division of Emergency Management hired Trinity to administer COVID-19 vaccinations and employee canvassers to sign people up to get vaccinated. On June 13, 2024, the Division of Emergency Management wrote to Trinity demanding a refund of alleged overpayments.
The letter demanded a response or refund by July 15.
In its response to the lawsuit, Trinity said it complied with the state’s deadline.
“Trinity promptly responded to FDEM’s written demand on July 12, 2024, and stated that it was unable to substantiate crept of any monies in error or any bases of repayment to FDEM, but was nevertheless willing to discuss the basis of the claimed overpayments. However FDEM did not respond to Trinity’s correspondence and instead proceeded to file this lawsuit on December 30, 2024,” the company said in its filing. FDEM is an acronym for the state Division of Emergency Management.
On June 28, 2021, the state said in its lawsuit, the Division of Emergency Management sent Trinity an “overpayment of $5,057,050.00” instead of the $50,578.50 it actually owed “due to a clerical error.”
The state said it discovered the error “shortly thereafter” and then found “several” more. The grand total of overpayments, the state said, was almost $5.8 million.
“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,” the state’s lawsuit said. “Trinity refused to return the overpayments and instead has kept $5,778,316.45 that it was not entitled to and had not earned.”
In its response on Tuesday, Trinity didn’t say whether it believes it does or doesn’t owe any money to the state.
Instead, the Miramar-based company asked the Leon County Circuit Court to issue a stay — which is a legal pause — on the proceedings and instead enforce an alternative dispute resolution procedure under its contract with the state.
The contract “explicitly provides for a pre-suit dispute resolution process, including mediation of any disputes … ” The company said the stay would provide time to fulfill the dispute resolution and mediation provisions of the contract.
Cherfilus-McCormick represents the 20th Congressional District, which takes in most of the African American and Caribbean American communities in Broward and Palm Beach counties.
The case, filed in Leon County Circuit Court in Tallahassee, the state capital, names the company, not Cherfilus-McCormick. Her name is on some of the attachments the state’s attorneys filed with the lawsuit.
The alleged overpayment took place before she was elected to Congress.
She was first elected in a January 2022 special election to fill the vacancy created the year before by the death of the late U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings.
The congresswoman was elected to a full term in November 2022. No Democratic primary challenger or Republican general election challenger came forward to run against Cherfilus-McCormick in 2024, making her the only one of Florida’s 28 members of Congress returned to office without facing a primary or general election.
In June 2022, Cherfilus-McCormick said via email that COVID work — part of an effort to distribute vaccines in minority communities at a critical time — was “the proudest moment in my career.”
At the time, she said, “minorities were not getting vaccinated” and Trinity hired African American, Caribbean American and Hispanic health-care professionals “to educate the communities they lived in” and encourage vaccination.
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.