THE WATCHDOGS: Clout-heavy firm getting millions from state's late bill-paying | Chicago Sun-Times

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….With the state spending so much on late fees to health insurers, technology firms, social service agencies and other vendors, Hynes and Solis Doyle started a company called Vendor Assistance Program, known as VAP, to cash in. They began working with the administration of then-Gov. Pat Quinn five years ago on a first-of-its-kind state initiative with a similar name — the Vendor Payment Program. It allows the state’s vendors to get their overdue money sooner — if they’re willing to give up their late fees to Hynes and Solis Doyle’s company.

If the state doesn’t pay a bill within 90 days, eligible vendors can collect 90 percent of what they’re owed by selling their unpaid bills to the Hynes-Solis Doyle venture. When the VAP collects the full payment from the state, it pays the vendors the remaining 10 percent but keeps all of the late fees. Under the law, the state has to pay 1 percent interest a month on all bills more than 90 days past due.

Since 2011, more than 900 state vendors have signed up with VAP. The company has bought late bills from only 180 of them, according to records it submits to the state.

VAP borrows the money to pay those vendors. Since 2011, the state has paid the company $570 million toward late vendor invoices totaling $585 million, the most recently available state records show. VAP was still waiting for the state to pay the rest of those bills as of the end of July.

The state has paid VAP $22.3 million in late fees.

The Hynes-Solis Doyle company has marketed itself as a lifeline for small businesses that can’t afford to wait for the state to pay their bills. But it has spent 90 percent of its money helping just three companies: two of them health insurance companies for state employees — Health Alliance and Coventry Health Care — and tech giant IBM. Together, the three have accounted for $529.6 million of the $585 million in invoices VAP has taken on.

Since Malcolm Weems, a former top Quinn aide, developed the Vendor Payment Program, four other companies have been given state approval to compete for the business with VAP. Three of them haven’t bought a single unpaid bill. The fourth has bought late state bills totaling less than $100,000. Weems couldn’t be reached for comment.

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