Citizens Office of Corporate Integrity can’t compete with Coyote Ugly [The Miami Herald]

Nov. 24--Look, we've all had those best-forgotten moments of inebriated indiscretions, not unlike the night the gang from Citizens Property Insurance headed over to Coyote Ugly in Tampa, perhaps to discuss, over too many cocktails, how to wring more money and misery out of their beleaguered policyholders.

So when the two management-level babes from Citizen's human resources department, one of whom happened to be the assistant director, climbed atop the bar, discarded their bras and did a bit of dancing, one twirling her garment around overhead like a lariat, we could maybe shrug off their performance off as a rather novel attempt at HR morale boosting. (I'm firing off a note to the Herald's own HR department, demanding, "What about our damn morale?")

Hey. They could hardly help themselves. Investigators from the Citizen's Office of Corporate Integrity, which looked into this incident and other improprieties at Florida's infamous provider of catastrophic insurance, noted that Coyote Ugly harbored "...a boisterous drinking environment. Women are encouraged to dance on the bar, remove their bras, and in some instances, hang their bras from the rafters."

And like I said, we've all had drunken moments we'd like to erase from history. The really nice thing about working for Citizens is that forgetting about scandalous instances of corporate misconduct appears to be official company policy.

In fact, a 73-page report by the investigators from its own Office of Corporate Integrity into the wild nights and opprobrious behavior and sexual harassment and lavish spending and cover-ups and expensive faux investigations and crazy big severance pays for disgraced employees was, indeed, forgotten by the big dogs at Citizens.

The damning report was reduced to a few innocuous pages. The original was secreted away and might have been consigned to oblivion had it not been unearthed by Herald reporter Toluse Olorunnipa. The four investigators from the Citizen's office of corporate integrity, who compiled all that embarrassing stuff, were fired. And the office was eliminated. It was like magic. Poof. And all history of bad behavior just disappeared. Or would have, had not Toluse come nosing around.

His reporting comes at a less than propitious time for Citizens, which has enraged its hurricane policy holders by jacking up rates 10.8 percent and running a nitpicking "re-inspection" program that seemed to be a charade, just an excuse to tack on another $800 to homeowner premiums. Meanwhile, the company was tossing thousands of other policyholders over to private insurers and was loaning $350 million out of its reserve funds to those private outfits, at very sweet terms, so they would take even more of these troublesome customers off their hands.

And there was the unrestrained spending by Citizens executives uncovered by The Herald/Times last summer, the nights in the Ritz-Carlton and the $889 dinner for three execs and their wives that night in London. It turned out that when Citizens called itself our insurer of last resort, "resort" referred to that $633-a-night resort hotel in Bermuda.

The peasants, as Citizen bosses seem to regard their 1.4 million policy holders, were already in the mood to grab their pitchforks march on the Citizens execs, either at their headquarters or at Coyote Ugly, depending on whether or not the revolt happened to coincide with happy hour.

Against all that, you could understand why Citizens might want to lose a scandal-laden report from the Office of Corporate Integrity. And while they were at it, just get rid of the whole damn office.

The report has this stuff about the braless bar dancing in Tampa and the former director of underwriting taking his staff on a rowdy outing in Key West, replete with more inappropriate, harassing behavior. And the Citizen corporate counsel's lack of a Florida law license. And other stuff (including an interesting passage about an employee running a sex toy mail order business using the company computers and the Citizens mail room.) Most of the allegations of unseemly behavior had originally been dismissed after a faux investigations performed by hired private law firms. The hired guns knew what to find. The company paid $2,403,952 since 2003 to outside lawyers to find, 92 percent of the time, that allegations of bad behavior were "unsubstantiated." (The review by the Office of Corporate Integrity, noting that the lawyers didn't do much actual investigating, found only 46 percent of the complaints had been unwarranted.)

But if the rowdy behavior was too much, even by Citizens' permissive standards, getting fired could be pretty lucrative. The report found Citizens had written checks amounting to $752,903 in severance pay since 2004. Scandalous behavior seem to pay off big-time. Another underwriting veep accused of having an adulterous affair with one of his workers, and hitting up another young woman in his office for $5,000 to help him hire a lawyer to fend off the accusations, was given $80,000 severance, and $40,000 in accrued vacation and sick pay, to go away.

The problem, of course, is that Citizens, while giving away big chunks of severance money to its naughty party boys and paying law firms to not ferret out bad behavior by other employees, was simultaneously putting the big squeeze on Floridians.

Finally, even Gov. Rick Scott noticed. He dispatched the state inspector general, who was already looking at last summer's reports of Citizens' lavish spending, to investigate this latest scandal.

But it seems pretty self-explanatory. When Citizens got rid of its Office of Corporate Integrity, the company jettisoned its last vestiges of corporate integrity.

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