AUBURN — After a tumultuous month, President Wendy Bergeron is closing Possibilities Counseling.

Located on Center Street, Possibilities had 500 affiliate therapists and case managers serving 10,000 mental health clients around Maine. About a month ago, a pair of surprise Department of Health and Human Services inspections found that 16 of 18 office staffers walked out in August and had largely been replaced by Bergeron’s untrained family and friends.

On Sept. 21, the state issued a conditional license and slate of conditions Bergeron had to meet over the next year.

Instead, DHHS spokesman John Martins said Bergeron confirmed through an attorney late on Friday that she was giving her 30-day notice and shutting down.

Records indicate that the state paid Possibilities more than $3.8 million for counseling services between June and Sept. 15.

DHHS is now moving thousands of patients off the mental health agency’s roster and transitioning them to other agencies. For the Possibilities’ affiliates who complain they haven’t been paid in a month or more, the state is advising their only recourse may be the courts.

Bergeron didn’t return phone messages left at the agency Monday. Citing an ongoing lawsuit and likely countersuits, her attorney, John Geismar at Norman, Hanson & DeTroy, declined comment.

None of the deficiencies cited by the state last month involved patient care. Instead, the deficiencies included new staff who hadn’t been properly trained or given background checks, files left unsecured and therapists who hadn’t been paid or had checks bounce.

Possibilities worked with affiliates by giving patient referrals and billing insurance, MaineCare and Medicaid on their behalf, and filtering those payments back. In an e-mail announcing the closure Monday, Bergeron told affiliates “you will be reimbursed for September and October’s billing as soon as we receive funds.”

For affiliates who aren’t getting that money, Martins said collecting back pay is a civil matter.

“Our job is to process MaineCare claims — if they provide the service and the properly supported claims, then we pay them,” he said. That’s where DHHS’s involvement ends.

Department of Labor spokesman Adam Fisher said, in general, independent contractors aren’t viewed as “a worker-employee relationship, it’s a business-to-business relationship.”

“If it is truly an independent contractor relationship, their only recourse is really through the courts,” Fisher said. “(In those cases) we don’t have any authority under state law to enforce wages.”

“Jane,” a case manager willing to speak only if her name were withheld, said she had been told the same thing when she asked the state for help. Going on six weeks without being paid by Possibilities, she said her furniture had been repossessed and her water briefly shut off until a sister stepped in to help with that bill.

“We’ve tried to be here for our clients through all of this, but it’s hard. You’re giving maybe, at your best, 75 percent,” she said. “This has been an extremely emotional and costly learning experience.”

“Jane” said she and a business partner had both decided to leave Possibilities and signed with Health Affiliates Maine, a mental health agency on Court Street formed by former Possibilities’ staff. On its website, Andrea Krebs is listed as executive director of Health Affiliates Maine; she’s still on the Possibilities website as vice president there.

“Jane” said she was in the midst Monday of discharging clients from Possibilities and enrolling them in HAM, a stressful process.

“If (clients) hear that they found records out (in the open), they don’t want anyone to see their personal stuff,” she said. “So it takes a while. We have to calm them down, reassure them. An intake that may take an hour is taking about three.”

She and her partner are among several former affiliates exploring a class action suit against Possibilities. Her partner, who said she had been forced into “borrowing money from my mother who lives off disability,” said she was angry to hear word of Possibilities’ closing. She was both optimistic and hesitant about moving forward with the new agency.

“Because these are the 16 people that had walked out before and I don’t trust them, but I do need to get paid,” she said.

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