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At the end of last Monday’s article, Part 1 of the Roberta Garrett Story, posted on September 22^nd 2008, we find Ms.Garrett at the point where she confronts her boss, Greg Chmielewski, with the fact that claimants, doctors, hospitals, attorneys, emergency rooms, plus all the various and sundry assorted vendors who service claims, are bombarding her with phone calls because they have either not received their checks or their checks have bounced.   Thus, she’s at the point now of really losing it.

So, she’s having a melt down, and Chmielewski tells her in this moment that okay, you’re stressed, nobody should have this much stress, so I’m just going to make these claims disappear.  Therefore, he simply dumps the claims.   Just like that.  He boxes them up, takes them out of the Independent Management Resources/Independent Staffing Solutions office, and just chucks them somewhere.  Roberta didn’t know where—but it was certainly somewhere where nobody would ever adjust them or handle them, for sure. 

To reiterate for new readers, Roberta Garrett got this job as a claims manager/administrator on the employer’s side when she interviewed with Independent Management Resources in the early Summer of 2006 in Roseville, California, after she answered an Ad she found on www.monster.com.  Henceforth, a year later she finds herself in claims administration Hell when her telephone explodes with angry claimants, attorneys, clients, and providers who have not been paid and/or have had their checks bounce.  So, to solve the problem, her boss, Greg Chmielewski, acting a bit like he thought he was a magician, takes the files out of the office to somewhere and directs all the claimants through a letter to now contact a Tribal Appeals Board somewhere in Independence, California.  Garrett believes this Tribal Appeals Board didn’t even exist. When claimants and their service providers would call the toll free phone number for the Tribal Appeals Board, they would merely get a voice mail greeting requesting that they leave their name and number, but nobody would ever call back.  So, all the phone calls simply went into a void.  And, according to Garrett, Chmielewski was hoping it would all simply end there.

Today, Roberta Garrett is not about to allow it all to end there.  She has, for the last year since her termination from IMR/ISS, relentlessly continued to press the California Department of Insurance.  She feels professionally responsible for what she estimates are more than 200 claimants who were simply abandoned, and now wants to see all these claimants who were dumped by Chmielewski served and cared for.

After Chmielewski moved out the files, “That’s when a sign went up on the door stating that Independent Management Resources had moved,” Garrett recalls.  “But here we all are, all the same people, inside this little office.  And with all these people not getting paid, we were concerned for safety reasons.”

So, Garrett and the IMR/ISS employees got a door bell installed, and the door stayed locked all the time.  The only time it got opened was for Fed Ex and mail deliveries.  Then, the company became Empyrean.  All the former Independent Management Resources and Independent Staffing Solutions employees became Empyrean employees.  The name changed, but the game seemed to just stay the same. 

On or about September 13^th 2007, Garrett tried to help an injured worker get the surgery he desperately needed, “And in helping this injured worker, I told the client, ‘Whatever you do, do not repeat this conversation to Greg Chmielewski, because I need to be able to help you.’ ” She then instructed the client to go over to the Uninsured Employers’ Fund to file the appropriate paperwork.  And the client promised her she would not speak to Greg Chmielewski about what Roberta instructed her to do. 

But no more than a half an hour after Garrett hung up with the client, Chmielewski wrote Garrett an email stating he had just gotten off the phone with that particular client. “I knew that night in my gut,” Roberta remembers, “Oh, God, now what?  And the next day I was laid off.”

Formally, Chmielewski said it was a lay off.  He said that he was sizing Empyrean down.  But Garrett explains, “I told the client that basically she was going to have to get an attorney because her claim was being dumped.”  And she insisted to the client not to disclose the conversation.  The injured worker rightfully deserved the surgery.  “He was a very serious injury (case) and he needed the surgery,” Garrett recalls.  “And I wanted to help him.”

“This is what you do when you’re in an HR capacity with claims,” Garrett expresses further.  “You report them.  You make sure people get help.  The one thing that I’d like to mention in this article is that a couple of times during this (state) investigation, it’s been implied to me that maybe I took this too personally.  And I would like it out there to the agencies that didn’t help, that no, I was just doing my job.  Because that’s what that role is for.  And it’s the job of the Department of Insurance, as far as I know, to make sure I do that role.  So, I mean, it’s been very upsetting to me to wonder, how did this many people fall through the cracks?”

Counting all the claims that didn’t get reported, and all the claims that didn’t get served, Garrett believes the number of them could be more than her ballpark stab of 200.  She estimates that they represent millions of dollars in reserves, because of all the medical providers, hospitals, needed surgeries, TTD owed, PD owed, lawyers, court reporters, and the list goes on. 

“There are countless people out there who are trying to figure out, ‘How are we going to get paid?’ So, if you just start adding up the number of people who are lining up trying to collect their just due, I wouldn’t even know where to begin on that.”

“In your last article,” Garrett continues in her interview with this writer, “You mentioned one claimant who needs surgery, but there are a huge number of those people out there who need surgery. You have people who are going to need Future Medical.  You are going to have claims in the future come out of the woodwork that were denied under Tribal Law that would have been accepted in California.”

So, where did all the monies go from the client premiums that were supposed to go into the reserves to pay for these claims? 

Garrett believes most of the monies went into multiple real estate and construction projects touted through Empyrean Holdings.  One such project that can be found at   www.goempyrean.com is amazingly enough, the Independence Casino! After having been through the havoc this group has caused, Garrett can't imagine the Tribe going back for more!  She regains her sense of humor when she looks at the Painted Desert Casino project.  "Those pictures were hanging in the office during my interview! That was the "spa" I envisioned after a long day of risk management in the casino...!"

She has also been following another project, Village Lakes, through local Kewaskum, Wisconsin, news and legal notices posted on the web.  One such posting was the minutes of the local Village Board meeting, held on July 7, 2008.  “What’s interesting,” Garrett observes, “is how does a local businessman in Kewaskum, Wisconsin, say he’s going to be selling Greg Chmielewski this multi-million dollar project when Greg touts (on Empyrean's website) that it already is his project?  And how does Chmielewski buy a multi-million dollar project when he’s in bankruptcy? 

“I don’t know all the players in all of these deals, but I’m still digging and learning.  The only thing that has become very apparent to me, and I’ve got to get all the nuts and bolts and the whys together, but it’s very clear to me that the Department of Insurance wanted this to be buried.

“But I won’t bury it.” And apparently, neither will a few persistent others. Garrett isn't the only person searching the Internet on key players. Since this series began, this writer has been contacted by multiple people, across the nation.

One individual recently described this insurance scam as just one of Chmielwski's many elaborate "Pump and Dump" schemes.

Stay tuned for future stories...