County Paying $890,950 to Consultant in Health Care Scandal

Milwaukee County Courthouse. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

Milwaukee County will pay nearly $1 million to a health care consultant that worked on the health insurance deal at the center of a recent government scandal.

Beginning Jan. 1, the county was briefly without a contract for employee health care. While employees never lost coverage, it was revealed that the county staffer in charge of the contract did not follow government procurement rules for soliciting or negotiating the deal and that the county’s top financial officials were having trouble verifying the financial projections produced by a third-party consultant.

That consultant is Willis Towers Watson (WTW). The global business consultancy is paid to assist the county with health care deals. Its new contract is valued at approximately $890,950 over the next five years. However, if past practices are any indication, WTW ultimately stands to take in more than $1 million from the county after its involvement in the health care fiasco.

A statement by a spokesperson for Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley suggested his administration doesn’t plan to break off a relationship with the firm any time soon. The county and WTW have a “longstanding relationship” and the firm is “working with us to answer questions, address concerns, and refine practices moving forward,” the spokesperson said.

It remains unclear what role WTW played in failing to finalize a new contract before the previous one expired. The county staffer working with WTW on the deal, Tony Maze, has since been fired, and representatives of the firm were absent during recent public meetings when the contract was discussed, including an emergency meeting called on Feb. 2. Sup. Justin Bielinski asked them to attend the meeting that day, he said, and they chose not to.

Sup. Sheldon Wasserman told Urban Milwaukee the county’s high-priced consultant should have been at the meeting. “What are we paying this organization almost a million dollars to do for us when we’re not seeing them or hearing from them?” he said.

By the time the board called the emergency meeting, Maze had already told supervisors he did not follow county rules for procurement when he and WTW solicited bids for the contract, and the independent Office of the Comptroller was raising red flags about the contracting process and WTW’s fiscal projections. Those projections appeared to be the basis of a budgetary estimate provided to county supervisors before voting on the contract, according to CJ Pahl, who said she “had concerns” the first time she saw WTW’s numbers in October. As of that meeting, just days before a board vote on the health care contract, her office had still been unable to “reconcile” them with her office’s own forecast of health care costs.

At that meeting Wasserman questioned what exactly WTW was doing for the county, and whether some of the work should be brought in-house. “Why are we relying on this organization so much to provide so much information to us?” he asked.

WTW is a global business consultancy and brokerage firm, with roots going back to the 19th century London brokerage Henry Willis & Co. After nearly 200 years of mergers and acquisitions, the company known today as WTW employs more than 40,000 people across 140 countries. Elizabeth Wright, working out of the Milwaukee office, worked on the deal with Maze. Wright did not respond to a request for comment.

WTW has had a contract with the county since 2016. That first contract netted the firm $519,000 for work from March 2017 through February 2020. From 2020 until May last year, the county paid WTW $692,000, or an annual rate of $173,000.

In May last year, the county’s contract with the firm was about to expire. Maze brought a new agreement to the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors for approval. “They gave us a 3% increase, which I negotiated with them,” Maze told supervisors on the Committee on Finance. The new rate was $178,190. It was a five-year contract valued at $890,950. The board approved the contract.

Then in September, Maze returned to the board with an amendment. He had screwed up the dates on the original file. Supervisors had approved a contract running from June 1, 2025 to May 31, 2029. The contract was supposed to run through May 2030, Maze explained. “This amendment is just a date change for the end date,” he said. Again, the board approved it.

Little did supervisors know that as they were voting to approve the new contract with WTW, the first problems with the health care deal were surfacing in emails between Maze and the comptroller’s Audit Services Division. Maze was asking for a review of audit language in the contract. The comptroller’s audit division found the language wanting and asked to see the rest of the contract. Maze reportedly dragged his feet. When the board voted to approve the deal in February, the preferred audit language had never been added.

It’s not known what WTW required of the health care corporations bidding on the county’s contract. The original request for proposals (RFP) reportedly released by WTW, which Maze called “extensive,” has still not seen the light of day. In the days leading up to the county board vote on the new contract, the administration and the county attorneys were putting significant pressure on the board to approve the deal. However, at that time, members of the county executive’s office and the county’s own attorneys told Urban Milwaukee they had not seen a copy of the original RFP from WTW.

As of publishing, Chief HR Director Margo Franklin and the county executive’s office have not responded to a request for comment on the RFP, or whether they have seen a copy of it.

The Crowley administration spokesperson did say “feedback” concerning the firm’s financial projections “was addressed directly with WTW, with a shared goal of overall improvements to accuracy and methodology.”

If the county pays out the rest of the current WTW contract, taxpayers will have paid the firm approximately $2.1 million since 2016. The contracts have historically been renewed mid-year. If WTW is given another deal in 2030, the firm stands to take in more than $1 million in taxpayer funds after its involvement in the health care debacle.

“If we’re paying all this money, what are we getting? is my fundamental question,” Wasserman told Urban Milwaukee. He wants to know what responsibility the firm had to help the county avoid the mistakes that led to the lapse in the health care contract.

County officials have been in contact with WTW, according to the administration spokesperson. But Wasserman said the board has heard nothing from the consultant. “No letter, no information,” he said. The board was under significant pressure from the administration to approve the new health care deal, and WTW was never available to explain what they were voting on.

“We had no explanation of benefits from this organization,” Wasserman said, “and in our time of need… they were nowhere to be seen or heard.”