Crowley v. Center

931 F. Supp. 2d 824, 35 I.E.R. Cas. (BNA) 607, 2013 WL 1154212, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 40247
CourtDistrict Court, N.D. Ohio
DecidedMarch 20, 2013
DocketCase No. 3:12 CV 369
StatusPublished
Cited by7 cases

This text of 931 F. Supp. 2d 824 (Crowley v. Center) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, N.D. Ohio primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Crowley v. Center, 931 F. Supp. 2d 824, 35 I.E.R. Cas. (BNA) 607, 2013 WL 1154212, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 40247 (N.D. Ohio 2013).

Opinion

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

JACK ZOUHARY, District Judge.

Introduction

Plaintiff Christine Crowley filed this action alleging Defendant St. Rita’s Medical Center (“St. Rita”) terminated her employment because she raised concerns about Defendant John Renner, St. Rita’s chief financial officer, intentionally falsifying corporate financial documents. She asks this Court to recognize a new public policy exception to Ohio’s employment at-will doctrine in R.C. § 1702.54, and to find that St. Rita unlawfully terminated her employment. Defendants moved for summary judgment (Doc. 32), arguing that R.C. § 1702.54 does not evince a sufficiently clear public policy to create an exception to the employment at-will doctrine and, even if it does, Plaintiff was fired for permissible performance reasons. What Plaintiff views as intentional falsification of corporate documents, Defendants characterize as merely an accounting dispute between Plaintiff and Renner. Plaintiff opposes the Motion (Doc. 35), attaching a signed but unnotarized affidavit. Defendants move to strike or in the alternative object to this affidavit (Docs. 38 & 39). Both Motions are fully briefed and pending before this Court, which held a record hearing on the matter on February 21, 2013. This Court has diversity jurisdiction.

Background

St. Rita is an Ohio not-for-profit corporation operating medical treatment facilities throughout Ohio, including an acute care hospital in Lima, and is owned by Catholic Health Partners (“CHP”), which operates regional health systems in Ohio and Kentucky (Doc. 1). In December 2008, St. Rita hired Plaintiff as its Administrative Director of Revenue Cycle with responsibility for collecting revenue from patient accounts, developing managers, and cultivating high morale (Doc. 1-1; Crowley Dep. 46-47). From August 2009 until her termination, Plaintiff reported to Renner (Renner Dep. 5).

During her employment, Plaintiff exercised certain responsibilities over patient accounts: she submitted certain financial information to corporate headquarters, attended monthly revenue meetings, and met regularly with Renner to discuss the department and her performance. One area to which Plaintiff was exposed was accounts receivable (“AR”), which represents the money owed to St. Rita by patients, insurers, and the federal government (Crowley Dep. 141). The AR’s value is reflected in St. Rita’s monthly financial statements, which can be used by bondholders, banks, and other interested parties to assess St. Rita’s financial position and performance (Rieger Dep. 70; Platzke Dep. 29). Some quantity of the AR is comprised of “bad debts” which are considered unlikely to be collected based on the [827]*827amount of time the debts have been outstanding.

To collect revenues, St. Rita’s policy is to send debts outstanding for 45 days to collection agencies, which are then paid a contingency fee for any amounts collected (Youngblood Dep. 45). If, after 120 days payment is not received, the accounts are treated as “bad debts” — a designation determined by St. Rita’s chief financial officer. This is an informal guideline and typically St. Rita is able to recover approximately twelve to fourteen percent of these delinquent accounts (Crowley Dep. 63,107, 123-24). During Plaintiffs employment, St. Rita shifted from using one collection agency to five different agencies handling various aspects of the collection process (id. at 61). This changeover delayed the timely collection of revenue, which in turn increased the amount of “bad debts” during 2009-10 (id. at 63-64).

St. Rita uses software known as Crowe Analytics to ensure sufficient reserves are assigned to cover bad debts based on past collection history (Rieger Dep. 49; Renner Dep. 63). Depending on this history, bad debts are automatically and fully reserved if they have been outstanding between 180 and 365 days (Crowley Dep. 84-85; Rieger Dep. 81; Youngblood Dep. 63), and the reserves automatically reconcile with the amount of bad debt at some point in the fiscal year (Rieger Dep. 81). This reserve methodology and its valuation of AR is audited twice annually by an outside firm, and the auditors reported no issues in 2009 or 2010 (Rieger Dep. 65,107, 111).

Variances arise over the course of a fiscal year between revenue and bad debts such that reserves may require adjusting (Youngblood Dep. 53-54). St. Rita’s financial team held monthly “net revenue calls” during which all financials were discussed, including the amounts and impacts of AR, bad debts, and reserves (Rieger Dep. 37-38; Crowley Dep. 65-68). It was during these calls, and other interactions with Renner and others, that Crowley expressed concern regarding the amount of cash reserves relative to bad debts. She claimed that the numbers published in the financial statements did not match up with “dashboard” data, a document she submitted monthly (Crowley Dep. 70-71). Because the numbers did not match up, Plaintiff believed Defendants were publishing inaccurate monthly financial statements.

Unlike the financial statements, though, the dashboard is an unpublished internal document that does not include information related to net revenues or reserves— it is useful in assessing the performance of patient accounting (for which Plaintiff was responsible), but not useful in determining Defendants’ financial strength (Rieger Dep. 55, 59, 64). St. Rita’s director of finance, Tim Rieger, who prepares the financial statements and is a certified public accountant, attempted to explain the distinctions to Crowley, but was unsuccessful (Rieger Dep. 71-74). Plaintiff alleges she began receiving bad performance reviews once she disagreed with Renner on how St. Rita calculated its reserves. She also alleges, and Defendants deny, that Renner at least once asked Plaintiff to modify the information in her dashboard document to match up with the data on the financial statements prepared by Rieger (Crowley Dep. 78-80). The simmering dispute between Plaintiff and Renner over reserves came to a head following a June 6, 2010 report to the executive team where Defendants wrote off approximately $10 million (Crowley Dep. 43). Plaintiff blamed the loss on Renner’s decisions regarding reserve amount, and reported her impression to Renner, as well as Deborah Youngblood, a corporate vice president (id. at 42-43, 140-41). [828]*828Separate from the dispute over AR, Plaintiffs employment with St. Rita was relatively tumultuous. Several St. Rita employees testified they found Plaintiff to be an ineffective manager from early in her tenure (Youngblood Dep. 24). Some found Plaintiff to be unreliable (Cason Dep. 41-42), or unwilling to make changes regarding her management of accounts (Renner Dep. 47; Youngblood Dep. 29-80, 64-66). Further, Rieger questioned her ability to understand financial reporting (Rieger Dep. 40-41) and differed with her regarding reporting of financial information (id. at 38). Her performance reviews reflected these issues, and her overall performance grade for 2009 was noted as “needs improvement” (Ex. 7 at 1). Defendants alleged, and Plaintiff does not appear to dispute, that she walked out in the middle of a performance review in which Renner discussed the reasons for the “needs improvement” grade (Renner Dep. at 153); and walked out again at a June 2010 meeting, during which her employment was terminated. Plaintiff filed this lawsuit in February 2012.

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Bluebook (online)
931 F. Supp. 2d 824, 35 I.E.R. Cas. (BNA) 607, 2013 WL 1154212, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 40247, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/crowley-v-center-ohnd-2013.