July 23, 2010
PayFlex Systems USA, Inc.
10802 Farnam Drive, Suite 100
Omaha, NE 68154
To whom it may concern:
I am very pleased with your administration of my medical FSA for my employer, Advent Software, Inc. Your Web site works well, I love being able to upload receipts as PDF files, and your debit-card system seems to work quite well. My PayFlex FSA is the best administered of any I’ve had.
However, one recent experience with it was not positive. I am writing to you in the hope that you can improve your processes to make similar experiences less unpleasant for me and others in the future.
Recently, my FSA went into “overdrawn” status because of an unsubstantiated charge. While you were waiting for me to submit a receipt for it, I submitted a properly substantiated $15 claim through your Web site. I subsequently obtained the necessary receipt from the provider and sent it to you. In the meantime, however, my $15 claim was returned with an overdrawn account payment coupon.
After submitting the missing receipt and confirming that my account had returned to “active” status, I sent you a fax on July 15, enclosing a copy of the $15 EOB and asking you to pay me the $15. You ignored it.
Today, I spent over ten minutes on the phone, of which almost four were spent in automated menus. When I finally reached a person, she said that she would submit the claim to your research department for reprocessing, which is of course exactly what I asked to be done in my fax over a week before.
There are three different problems here, in decreasing order of importance:
I shouldn’t have had to contact PayFlex at all. When an account is in overdrawn status because of an unsubstantiated charge and the charge is substantiated, the account can and should be automatically reviewed for claims which were submitted and not paid in the interim, and those claims should be automatically reprocessed and paid. There’s really no excuse not to do this.
My fax should not have been ignored. I shouldn’t have had to call to get this resolved.
It’s extremely annoying that people calling you for help have to navigate several minutes worth of menu prompts before being given the opportunity to speak to someone.
Improvements in these areas will make the quality of your services even more of a competitive advantage than they are now.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Kamens
CC: [elided], HR Generalist, Advent Software, Inc.
Actually, their systems are set up to do exactly that. Anything that’s applied towards an overpayment will automatically be paid out upon proper substantiation of the item that went into overpayment; however, there are certain cases where the system wouldn’t have any idea that something needs to be paid back out. I spoke to someone with authority recently who said they’re working on a fix for those few rare scenarios that won’t trigger automatic reimbursement of claims that applied towards your overpayment.