Averhealth’s CEO on ProPublica, in The Washington Times

In roughly a decade of testing millions of samples a year for courts and agencies in more than 25 states, Averhealth has been faulted by regulators exactly once, on a single contract-compliance dispute with an agency in a single state, more than five years ago. A brief probation was lifted after several months, with no finding that any test result was affected. No court, regulator or plaintiff has ever established that an Averhealth result was wrong. The Justice Department examined other claims for years and found no basis to pursue any of them.

Nevertheless, ProPublica ran its piece — built largely on the account of a former employee who worked for us part-time for less than two months more than five years ago — and it has had exactly the effect a malicious article is designed to have. Agencies that had trusted us felt pressure to discontinue.

I have spent my entire career on a laboratory floor — first as a site manager, then for 11 years as chief operating officer — before I became Averhealth’s chief executive. My company is audited, accredited and adversarially tested in court, as it should be when the stakes are this high. I do not ask to be exempt from scrutiny. I ask only that it be consistent: that the same standards be applied to the alternatives, and that the cost to public trust of irresponsible accusations be weighed, before deciding my industry is the problem, and before a single anonymous account is allowed to outweigh a decade of dependable results.