A Cole County judge has ordered the Missouri Department of Social Services (DSS) to pay $120,000 for violating the state’s Sunshine Law by improperly withholding public records and delaying responses without reasonable justification.
when submitting the request in 2022 and not receiving a response from the government for months, HHS Technology, a software company and former state vendor, launched a lawsuit the following year when the data were refused.
Beetem mandated that the agency pay $5,000 in civil fines, reimburse legal fees, and turn over the required records.
In his order on Tuesday, Beetem stated, “[The Department of Social Services] vigorously defended this case which drove up the fees.”
Alexander Barrett, one of HHS Technology’s lawyers, claimed in a court filing in October that “the way [DSS] conducted this litigation was unreasonably difficult and costly to Plaintiff” and that the state “fought Plaintiff at each and every turn” instead of attempting the case’s simple legal issues.
Citing the pending case, a Department of Social Services representative declined to comment.
Additionally, Beetem mandated that DSS provide the information within 45 days, barring a stay by a higher court on appeal.
Beetem granted HHS Technology more than $23 million in August 2022 for its work on a fully integrated system for managing DSS programs, including Medicaid, after the business had been involved in years of litigation against the state for breach of contract.
The request for records, which was made in April 2022, included correspondence about the competitive bidding process as well as documents that demonstrated how the state received and distributed public funds for its Medicaid system.
Beetem disagreed with the state’s claim that the records were exempt from the Sunshine Law because they dealt with ongoing legal proceedings.
In his September verdict, Beetem described the information as “indisputably open” and stated that they were “prime examples of open records the Sunshine Law was intended to allow the public to access.”
According to Beetem, the state’s interpretation of the litigation exemption was unnecessarily expansive and would support the closure of any documents that might later be the focus of legal action.
According to Beetem, the department “willfully broke the Sunshine Law in order to unlawfully obtain an advantage in the…litigation.”
As part of a decision last year that said the attorney general’s office “knowingly and purposely” broke the open records law during the tenure of now-U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, Beetem ordered the state to pay more than $240,000 in legal fees.
