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Nixon’s Second Injury Fund Abuses, Ignored by Montee, Exposed in Report

August 7, 2007

JEFFERSON CITY – A newly released independent report on the Second Injury Fund fully exposed Jay Nixon’s abuses of the system including his use of the fund to reward political contributors and highlighted Susan Montee’s shoddy work in auditing a system she has personally benefitted from.

An actuarial study by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP shows that the state’s Second Injury Fund will go bankrupt in 2009 in large part because the fund’s expenditures under Nixon grew from $10.5 million in 1993 to $68 million in 2006. The growth in payments is staggering and troublesome in light of a 1992 St. Louis Post-Dispatch report in which Nixon "promised to change the [Second Injury Fund] by barring any participating lawyers from contributing to the attorney general’s political campaigns."

Meanwhile, the actuarial study also exposed the extent of Montee’s auditing deficiencies, including her failure to do an analysis of the fund’s history of expenditures, which raises more troubling questions about why she has failed to mention that her family law firm handled nearly 150 Second Injury Fund claims in recent years.

“This independent study has confirmed that Jay Nixon has mismanaged and abused the Second Injury Fund for more than a decade by rewarding his political contributors while pushing the Second Injury Fund to the brink of bankruptcy," said Paul Sloca, communications director for the Missouri Republican Party. "This independent study’s analysis of the financial degradation of the fund under Nixon also proves that Montee’s lousy job on the audit was nothing more than a whitewash designed to provide political cover for both herself and Jay Nixon who have long benefitted from the system.”