The District failed to pay health and life insurance premiums for most city employees injured or killed on the job for nearly a decade and only recently forked over the $5.7 million it owed, officials said. It’s up to the Office of Risk Management to ensure the city pays the premiums, but according to a report by D.C. Auditor Deborah Nichols the agency stopped making most of the payments in 2001. When the error was discovered last spring, then-Mayor Adrian Fenty fired the agency’s director, who had been made aware of the problem six years earlier, according to the audit.

“In [fiscal year] 2004 ORM’s former director was made aware of ORM’s … failure to record and remit deducted insurance premiums but made no effort to correct the problem,” Nichols’ report said. “The long term failure to correct this significant deficiency has resulted in inaccurate, false, or misleading financial information and the exposure of the District to significant unrecognized financial liability.”