No-Bid Contract Earns Company $55 Million From State For Contact

By Anita Wadhwani, Tennessee Lookout

November 23, 2021

Two months later, on October 20, the state issued a formal request for proposals for contact tracing, inviting bidders for the first time to enter a competitive process for selecting the state’s contractor going forward. The request describes the one-year contract for $20 million, a cost that also includes vaccine outreach efforts, comes with an estimated $20 million cost.

Five days after the RFP was issued, Dr. Lisa Piercey, commissioner of the Department of Health, signed a contract extension worth $20 million with Xtend through the end of January 2022.

Asked last week if Piercey is satisfied by Xtend’s performance, a health department spokeswoman said “the state is satisfied by the work of this vendor.”

The vendor, however, has at times drawn criticisms for its pandemic work.

In November 2020, four Xtend contact tracer workers told WPLN – Nashville Public Radio of extended backups in reaching patients until after their infectious periods had passed — or after a quarantine period for close contacts.

And as the school year began for Tennessee public schools — coinciding with the rapid spread of the Delta variant — school officials and parents in Knoxville, Clarksville, Sumner County and elsewhere began angrily criticizing the failure of the state’s contact tracing efforts to provide timely notifications on positive cases to schools and families. Parents said they were learning of COVID cases in their students’ classroom on Facebook, in car lines and often days after a quarantine period would be set to expire. A spokesman for the Department of Health said at the time it was the responsibility of state health officials through their contractor Xtend to provide contact tracing in schools.

A spokesman for Xtend told the Tennessee Lookout in September that it relied on the state health department to supply them with a list of contacts related to schools to call and joined state officials in criticizing some school districts for their failure to cooperate.

“While many schools are routinely sharing information – unfortunately there are some schools that are choosing not to follow-up with contacts or share information with the health department,” Paul Hartwick, an Xtend spokesman, said in a September 22 email.

“Xtend works cases and/or contacts provided by the health department.follow-up with contacts or share information with the health department. In these cases, the lack of information prevents the health department from conducting follow-up.”

Hartwick did not respond to the Lookout’s request to answer additional questions about their contact tracing efforts last week.

Xtend has also run into controversy over its pandemic contracts elsewhere.

New Jersey entered a $29.2 million contract for Xtend to staff a vaccine hotline making appointments for residents that earned criticism for giving out confusing information or redirected to other sources for the appointments.

Xtend has been operating in Hendersonville since 2009, primarily offering patient billing services to hospitals. By 2015, it was earning $70 million in revenue, according to a news release by Navient announcing it had acquired the Tennessee company. In 2019, Xtend received a $150,000 FastTrack grant from the state in exchange for pledging to create 200 jobs.

Xtend’s contract in Tennessee has helped the bottom line of its corporate parent, Naviant, during a turbulent time as it faced increased scrutiny by Congress and government regulators over its federal student loan servicing business. The company is facing multiple lawsuits from state attorney generals and the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over allegations of abusive loan practices connected to the 5.6 million student borrower accounts it has held.

It announced in September that it would exiting the federal student loan servicing sector for good.

By October, as Navient was reporting millions in losses from its student loan division, it announced a “focus on growth opportunities,” including pandemic related contracts with state governments. Revenues, Navient’s 2021 3rd quarter presentation to investors said, increased from $32 million or 36% compared to a year ago, “primarily as a result of revenue earned from new contracts to support states in pandemic relief services.”

Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Nashville Democrat, said last week that the “pattern of granting no-bid contracts to disreputable companies is really alarming, especially in this unique moment when we have more federal money coming into our state than we’ve ever had. Fiscal responsibility is not a partisan issue. We all want to know that our hard-earned tax dollars are employed responsibly for the benefit of our citizens.”

State health departments are starting to wind down contact tracing efforts, as the pandemic wanes and vaccinations have become available, according to Loren Lipworth, associate director for the Division of epidemiology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

“Whether there’s still a cost-benefit to this a lot really depends on the landscape of vaccination in a community,” Lipworth said. “But we as a state are not at a point where infection without contact tracing won’t lead to outbreak. There are still counties in Tennessee with very low vaccination rates. The role of contact tracing in those areas has not changed very much.”

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit network of state government news sites supported by grants and a coalition of donors.