WASHINGTON--Amidst concerns about extravagant conferences and travel by quality improvement organization (QIO) staff and other officials of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley is demanding more information about the agency's expenses.

In a letter to CMS Administrator Mark McClellan, Grassley requested "a detailed accounting" of the funding and costs for conferences and other travel meetings attended by CMS or QIO staff members in the last four years.

According to Grassley, R-Iowa, photographs of an annual QIO conference at the Don CeSar Beach Resort near St. Petersburg, Fla., "depict a luxurious resort, lavish dinners, dessert buffets and Hawaiian dance parties--all in a tropical beach locale.

"As you look at the photos of the Don CeSar event, you wonder if these contractors are going to luaus and playing golf instead of investigating patient complaints about poor Medicaid quality," Grassley said. "And then you have to wonder whether the federal employees who are supposed to make sure the contractors are doing the job we pay them to do are instead going to luaus and playing golf themselves."

Calling the notion of a lavish retreat "completely wrongheaded," Greg Simmons, a member of the planning committee for the 2005 meeting and CEO of Madison, Wis.-based Metastar, the Wisconsin QIO, said the pictures show a celebration largely funded by the hotel to commemorate the long-standing relationship between the resort and the conference.