Hospital Pays Employees After IRS Lifts All Liens : Health Care: San Diego General offers a good-faith assurance of meeting payroll tax obligations, hopes to resume emergency room services as early as today.

The Internal Revenue Service lifted the last of its liens against San Diego General Hospital on Wednesday, a hospital spokesman said, allowing most of the facility’s employees to be paid after a three-day delay.

The hospital also hopes to begin receiving emergency room patients again as early as today. It began diverting ambulances to other hospitals at midnight Monday.

The financially strapped hospital failed to meet its $250,000 payroll Friday after it learned that the IRS had filed 191 separate liens against it, freezing its assets.

The IRS stepped in because the hospital, already more than $1.2 million in arrears for past payroll taxes, was two days late in making its most recent payment, said Norm Martin, a consultant who has been working with the hospital since last summer.

Most employees received their payroll checks Wednesday afternoon after a brief staff meeting, Martin said. About 30 managers have not yet received their checks.

Rumors were circulating among employees Wednesday morning that the hospital was going to give staff members 25% of what they were owed and ask them to stay on, said Vicki Cavataio, an intensive-care nurse.

“The nurses I talked to weren’t willing to work,” she said. “They would take the 25%, but they were not going to come unless they were paid the full amount.”

Cavataio said hospital administrators did not tell them how they got the money to meet payroll, but thanked them for being patient.

“I’m glad they paid us today,” she said.

Martin said it was his understanding that the money to pay most of the hospital’s 300 employees came from the lifting of the IRS levies and not as a result of a purchase of its accounts receivable by another company.

The IRS had removed 20 of its largest liens Friday, he said. The rest were lifted in exchange for a good-faith assurance from the hospital that it would make an effort to meet its payroll deduction obligations on time, Martin said.

“The IRS has been working closely with us. I don’t think it’s in anybody’s interest for the hospital to close. It would have a detrimental effect on the community and other hospitals,” Martin said.

He said the hospital has been diverting all ambulance-carried patients to other facilities, but added that the emergency room may begin accepting trauma patients again as early as today.

He said he did not know how the hospital would make its next payroll, due Feb. 15.

“Payrolls are typically tight. Sometimes we operate from payroll to payroll. But this problem happened because of the levy,” Martin said.

The hospital’s patients are being taken care of, he said. He said state inspectors have been on hand every day since Friday “to make sure there’s no drop in the care of patients, supplies and staffing.”