RAC Permanent Program Delayed
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
announced yesterday that an automatic stay will be imposed on the contract work of the four Recovery Audit Contractors (RAC) program. The stay is required as a result of protests filed with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) by two unsuccessful bidders, Viant Inc. and PRG Schultz, USA Inc., for the RAC program, according to CMS.
The stay will mean that all work for all four contractors will stop until a GAO ruling, which must be made within 100 days, or by early February. CMS stated, in a brief note on its Web site, "The four RAC contracts--and any work under those contracts--are on hold pending the outcomes of the protests."
According to the AHA, CMS noted that it's still preparing for the RAC program throughout the country and said that further details will be posted about the postponement on the CMS Web site.
The automatic stay is more a matter of contractors' complaints over who should've gotten the permanent contracts to do RAC audits. The spat is unlikely to affect the RAC program permanently, and as it stands, work on the RAC program will resume when the matter is settled. According to The RAC Report (subscription required), PRG Schultz, one of the contractors that filed with the GAO, had the lowest percentage of appeals overturned during RAC demonstration. PRG Schultz is arguing that CMS denied it a place in the permanent audits because of its high contingency fee bid. The RAC Report said that CMS put the brakes on all RAC activity on Monday, an even stopped an education session already in progress.
The RAC Report also quoted Joseph Zebrowitz, MD, executive vice president of Executive Health Resources, Newtown Square, PA, who said that planning for the RAC program shouldn't be delayed by facilities because of the automatic stay. "I think it's important that this delay is not because of any question of whether the RACs are fair, or good, or legal," Dr. Zebrowitz said. "The RAC program is unchanged, and there is nothing out there to say that anything is going to be different. [CMS] just can not start when the contractors are in doubt. Once they resolve these complaints, they will start up."