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Nov. 20, 2024 |  By: Clara Bates - Missouri Independent

Sunshine Law violations by social services agency will cost Missouri $120,000

missouri records request

By Clara Bates - Missouri Independent

A Cole County judge on Tuesday ordered the Missouri Department of Social Services to pay more than $115,000 in legal fees and a $5,000 penalty for “knowingly and purposefully” violating the state’s open records law.

In September, Judge Jon Beetem determined that the department violated the Sunshine Law by wrongfully withholding public records based on the identity of requester and not the contents of the records. The department also took months to respond to the request without a reasonable justification, Beetem ruled. 

A software company and former state vendor, HHS Technology, submitted the request in 2022 and filed a lawsuit the following year after not hearing back from the department for months and ultimately being denied the records. 

Beetem ordered the department to turn over the requested records, pay $5,000 in civil penalties and cover attorney’s fees.

“[The Department of Social Services] aggressively defended this case which drove up the fees,” Beetem wrote in his order Tuesday.

In a court filing requesting fees in October, one of HHS Technology’s attorneys, Alexander Barrett, wrote that “the way [DSS] conducted this litigation was unreasonably difficult and costly to Plaintiff,” and that rather than trying the straightforward legal issues of the case, the state “fought Plaintiff at each and every turn.” 

A spokesperson for the Department of Social Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Beetem also ordered DSS to turn over the records within 45 days, unless stayed by a higher court on appeal.

HHS Technology was involved in years of litigation against the state for breach of contract and Beetem awarded the company more than $23 million in August 2022, over its work building a fully-integrated system for managing DSS programs including Medicaid.

The records request, submitted in April 2022, was for documents showing how the state requested and allocated public money for its Medicaid system and related communication about the competitive bidding process.

The state said the documents were exempt from the Sunshine Law because they were related to ongoing litigation, but Beetem disagreed.

“These are prime examples of open records the Sunshine Law was intended to allow the public to access,” Beetem wrote in his September ruling, calling the records “indisputably open.”

Beetem ruled the state’s interpretation of the litigation exemption was inappropriately broad and would justify closing any records that could be potentially subject to litigation in the future.

Beetem said the department “intentionally violated the Sunshine Law to impermissibly gain an advantage in the…litigation.”

Last year, Beetem ordered the state to pay more than $240,000 in legal fees as part of a ruling that found the attorney general’s office  “knowingly and purposefully” violated open records law while it was being run by now-U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley.