A leading GOP lawmaker on health-care issues wants a top-to-bottom review of the state's Medicaid agency, which has come under fire for trying to conceal accounting errors that resulted in its owing the federal government millions of dollars.

Sen. Shawn Mitchell--a Broomfield Republican who is his party's ranking member on the Senate Health and Human Services Committee--said Tuesday the irregularities reported at the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing may reflect an underlying pattern at the agency.

"Anytime the state bureaucracy winds up owing the feds millions of dollars due to its own errors, you have to dig deeper," Mitchell said. "Such a major miscalculation points to practices that may be widespread throughout the agency. State and federal taxpayers--and let's remember, we're both--deserve better accountability."

Mitchell also chided the administration of Gov. Bill Ritter for "attempting to soft-pedal" the controversy in a memo to audit committee members. The memo, from the governor's deputy chief of staff, denies any cover-up at the agency.

"Especially given such serious allegations, it is premature to clear the agency before it even has been thoroughly investigated," he said.

Mitchell's remarks follow hearings by the state Legislative Audit Committee this week into allegations that the Health Care Policy agency fired an employee who tried to blow the whistle on the accounting snafu. The revelations, which first came to light in a series of reports by Denver's KUSA-TV, Channel 9, included a recording in which an agency official urged coworkers to change information to make it difficult for auditors to notice how much money Colorado owes the federal government.

The news infuriated committee Republicans, who demanded an accounting of agency officials who appeared before them Monday.

"… It seems as if there is an attempt, at least on the part of the staff at HCPF, to hide information, to make it more difficult to receive," the GOP's Rep. Frank McNulty, of Highlands Ranch, told one agency official who testified. "And as a state employee, you and colleagues should be doing the exact opposite and making the information more readily available to the public and not trying to figure out some accounting gimmick to hide it or make it more difficult to find.”

McNulty added, "...this is over the line, there is absolutely no question that this is an affirmative statement that information is going to be concealed from state auditors ... and from the people of the state of Colorado."

After the hearing, McNulty echoed Mitchell's concerns about the potential for systemic abuse.

"What we have here is a system that is absolutely broken," McNulty said. "There is obviously a culture (in the agency) that supports this kind of behavior. This needs to stop."