Audit: $103 million lost due to Medicaid members living out of state

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - The Louisiana Legislative Auditor (LLA) has been closely watching the state’s Medicaid program.

About two years ago, an audit found that millions of dollars were lost because the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) paid out Medicaid benefits for people who no longer lived in the state. At that time, the auditor recommended that the health department use data from the Office of Motor Vehicles (OMV) to make sure recipients were still in the state.

From March of 2023 to December of 2024, the LLA conducted a progress report to see what had been done since their first report. Chris Magee, the data analytics manager for the LLA, says some progress has been made.

“Whenever the Medicaid program is the biggest program in the state in terms of cost, you really wanna make sure you have as many controls as possible in place to identify people who are and are not eligible,” Magee says. “While LDH was doing a little better at identifying and removing people who it knew about were living out of state, it still has not implemented using driver’s license data to identify people who’ve moved out of state.”

This most recent report found that over $103 million had been paid to insurance companies to cover more than 22,000 people enrolled in Medicaid who live out of state. When auditors started asking questions in March of this year, the LDH realized they needed to move quicker.

“In the past, an audit may have sat on the shelf and collected dust and now they’ve actually done something to fix the problem, which is good, so we have to point out because they were slow - what still went out the door, but now going forward the problem should be fixed.,” Magee says.

In April of 2025, LDH finally began using OMV data to help fix this issue. The state auditor’s office says this highlights the importance of fixing a problem quickly in order to save money from going out the door. Magee says with the use of the OMV data, this problem should be resolved in the future.

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