West Virginia Public Employees Insurance Agency image.
CHARLESTON, W. Va.–The Public Employees Insurance Agency, which ended the past fiscal year $93 million down, needs some extra time to come up with a financial plan for next year.
This is usually the time of year when PEIA comes up with a plan, presents it to its financial oversight board and goes out to public comment at a few stops around the state. After that, the proposal goes to the Legislature for budgeting for the coming year.
Agency director Jason Haught said the plan wasn’t quite ready yet. He proposed taking just a little more time and presenting a complete version in the very near future.
“I would like to apologize to the board. PEIA has not been able to complete its ’24-year plan to present to the board. As you see, it was in the agenda and we thought we were going to be able to achieve this by today, but there was not the ability to do so to get to the completion of that finance plan,” he said.
“As you know we had an extremely difficult ’22. We are trying our best to make sure we are including all of the ’23 results before we put together a five-year finance plan.”
Haught said agency officials reluctantly made the decision to delay, but that was necessary to gather as much financial information as possible. “So, again, my apologies. But I want to be right. When you have good numbers, it’s easy to come up with a financial plan,” he said, but bad numbers are a greater challenge for planning.
PEIA over the past fiscal year had pressures of increased demand for drug and medical expenses with lower-than-anticipated return on investments. Much of that was attributed to societal behaviors and economic effects coming out of the COVID-19 epidemic, and the officials overseeing the state insurance agency now hope much of that will smooth out.