GARFIELD HEIGHTS, Ohio — Caryn Werman reports she was in a fight to keep her company, A&A Heating and Cooling, in business after not being paid nearly $50,000 for jobs completed over the past year.
Werman told News 5 she and her husband had to take thousands of dollars out of their personal bank accounts just to make payroll for their eight employees after she says Choice Home Warranty failed to pay her company since May of 2022.
“It has been so hard, my husband and I had used every penny of our own personal savings to pay our guys to keep this going and we were literally just about to shut our doors," Werman said. “These are customers and clients of ours that had the warranty company coverage, and had us go out and do repairs, they gave us authorization numbers saying, 'okay do this repair,' like they had done a million times in the past, and then never paid.”
Werman said she contacted the company numerous times to ask Choice Home Warranty why payment on more than 300 completed jobs continued to be delayed, but each time Werman said she was given a wide variety of excuses.
"They gave us excuse, after excuse, after excuse until we got News 5 involved, we were not getting any answers," Werman said. “First they would tell us their I.T. system was down, then they would say they couldn’t cut checks, then they would say if you run these five more calls we’ll pay you.”
Cleveland Better Business Bureau President Sue McConnell reported Choice Home currently has a "C" rating with the BBB and is the subject of anon-going consumer fraud lawsuitfile by the Arizona Attorney General.
“The company has had 11,000 complaints filed in the last 36 months and over 3,000 just within the last 12 months," McConnell Said. “The company was allegedly accepting payment for the warranty coverage but not really providing a lot of coverage, they were making what the Arizona Attorney General termed as bad faith refusals."
McConnell said it's crucial consumers and business vendors completely understand the the terms of the warranty contract before signing-up.
“Don’t make a quick decision, compare what company’s have to offer, understand what your deductible is, what they will cover, what they won’t cover, what you have to do to report repairs that you need," McConnell said. “Definitely read that contract very carefully, don’t sign it without reading, it’s probably going to be very lengthy."
News 5 contacted Choice Home Warranty headquarters in New Jersey and the company responded immediately, and issued the following statement:
“We apologize for the recent incident involving our failure to pay a vendor, which has caused inconvenience and hardship.
As a company that relies on thousands of vendors to provide repair services to our customers, we deeply regret any negative impact this may have caused.
We want to emphasize that this was an isolated incident and not indicative of our overall commitment to our vendors. As a company, we have over 25,000 vendors, and we pay hundreds of millions of dollars each year to support their businesses.
We take our relationship with our vendors seriously and have put in place rigorous processes to ensure timely and accurate payments. Although we were not contractually obligated to pay the vendor in question, we recognized that it was the right thing to do, and we acted swiftly to settle our outstanding payment.
We take full responsibility for our actions and are committed to learning from this incident to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.”
Werman told News 5 just 36-hours after Choice Home Warranty issued its statement a check of $47,200 was sent to her by express mail. Werman said consumers need to carefully shop home warranty companies, and said the long awaited payment will help keep her company going.
“News 5 has been amazing with your intervention, things moved really quickly after I spoke to Joe Pagonakis at News 5 and it has really, really been helpful," Werman said. “I can’t even put it into words, this will go a huge, long way for us to pay back people that we owe and get us a little cushion to move forward. I can’t say thank you enough.”
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