CORRECTION: Amerigroup Corp. will shift workers to Norfolk [The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va.]

May 02--CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Amerigroup Corp. has decided to relocate its corporate headquarters to Norfolk as part of its lease of the USAA building. The company said its corporate headquarters will remain in Virginia Beach.

Virginia Beach-based health insurer Amerigroup Corp. said today it will move as many as 500 workers to Norfolk by the end of this year.

Amerigroup has leased the former regional headquarters of the United Services Automobile Association, a 315,000-square-foot property near the intersection of Northampton Boulevard and North Military Highway.

The company, which coordinates services for people covered by Medicaid and other government-funded health care programs, employs nearly 2,200 workers in Hampton Roads and has approximately 5,100 workers across the country.

Amerigroup hasn't finalized its plans on all of the workers who will move to the Norfolk site, but some will include employees who handle technical functions, said Jim Truess, Amerigroup's chief financial officer.

"Our employment base is increasing and with that comes the need for more space," Truess said. "The opportunity over at the USAA site turned out to be a good one for us. We're going to have a variety of different functions going into place there. So it's a little bit of reshuffling."

Initially, workers will move from other locations in Hampton Roads, he said. Some of those workers are currently in offices the company had leased temporarily to accommodate its growth. In the past four years, the company said, it has added more than 400 local workers.

The Norfolk office building could handle as many as 1,000 workers, and the company plans to fill that space in two to three years, Truess said. Some of those will be workers relocated from other sites in Hampton Roads and from new hires, he said.

The company's corporate offices will remain in Virginia Beach at a building near Town Center, he said. An earlier report by The Virginian-Pilot that the company had decided to relocate its headquarters to the USAA building was incorrect, Amerigroup said.

"When you think about longer term, anything is possible at that time," Truess said. "We have leases on all of these properties."

When those leases expire, the company can always decide whether to stay or move elsewhere, he said.

USAA still has 370 employees, mostly claims workers, at the site, and the company is looking for a new location elsewhere in Hampton Roads, said Justin Schmitt, a spokesman for , which owns the building at 5800 Northampton Blvd.

The San Antonio-based insurance and financial services company, moved most of its Norfolk operations to other locations three years ago, leaving the majority of the space vacant.

"There may be a period of time when the building is cohabitated by the different companies," Schmitt said.

Josh Brown, 757-446-2318, [email protected]

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