This is a story that broke in February and was posted on TampaBay.com. Long story short, Citizens executives gave them selves huge pay raises last year, some as large as $31,000. Of course they decide to approve these raises as Citizens complains of losing money and stresses the need to cut back the number of policies it has. Rick Scott called the raises foolish and stressed that he never approved of them. This is not the first time Citizens has been questioned over spending. Prior investigations showed Citizens reckless spending on gourmet dinners, travel, alcohol and five star resorts. Receipts showed executives using the company credit card on thousand dollar dinners. Rick Scott pointed out that many state employees had not received raises in years and they don’t get to run up alcohol, dinner and travel expenses on the State’s tab either so why should Citizens be able to. This all of course comes on the heels of several Citizens executives being fired for misconduct several years ago. The story discusses how investigators discovered that almost $750,000 in severance packages were paid out to these fired executives. The story then notes that these investigators were also fired soon after revealing this. Rick Scott went on to call Citizens spending habits ridiculous and outrageous. In another recent article, it was shown that Citizens is so hell-bent on fighting sinkhole claims that it actually had spent 25% of its 3 year budget in the first three months. This is money going toward mock trials, experts and consultants just so Citizens can avoid paying claims. Maybe if some of this money being thrown away was paid to insureds (who pay these executives salaries) they wouldn’t need to spend so much money preparing for trial.