The president of a COVID-19 testing company said his team is working to catch up with data reporting requirements, days after the Colorado Attorney General’s Office sent him a letter ordering him to stop testing here.

The Georgia-based company, Macagain, operated eight locations in the metro, Boulder and Fort Collins, according to the cease and desist letter sent to the company Friday. In that letter, Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Weaver wrote to Macagain President Khalid Ansari that the company had failed to report the results of its tests and had to stop testing immediately or face additional action.

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The notice was announced in a weekend news release, which also described two similar letters sent to the Center for COVID Control, which ran three testing sites in the metro. According to the letter, that company was not appropriately licensed and had “conditions at (its) testing sites (that) do not comply with applicable regulations and guidance regarding patient safety – including the appropriate use of personal protective equipment.”

A representative for the Center for COVID Control directed questions to a separate email address; a message sent to that address seeking comment was not returned Monday. A company with the same name is registered with the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office, but its official address is not a legitimate Colorado address. The address matches an address in Illinois, with the state name switched out on the business registration from Illinois to Colorado. In an update posted to its website last week, with a dateline in Illinois, the company said it was experiencing high demand for testing. 

Ansari, of Macagain, told The Denver Gazette on Monday that he was frustrated his company was “bundled” in the announcement with “all of the other garbage other people are doing,” a reference to the Center for COVID Control. Ansari said his company had to individually report the results of more than 45,000 COVID-19 tests and that the surge – plus infections among his staff – had caused significant delays.

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He said his team had worked through the weekend and had reported nearly 7,000 of those results to the state Department of Public Health and Environment, which did not return a request for comment Monday. Ansari said he was writing an email to the agency Monday morning to describe what happened.

The company was “caught off guard” by the size of the surge and by infections among staff.

“We weren’t equipped for that. … We are a legit medical group, we send our test results to high-complexity labs,” he said.

The company is licensed with the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System, part of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, records show. 

A spokesman for the Colorado Attorney General’s Office said Monday that if Macagain – or the Center for COVID Control – become compliant with their different deficiencies, they can resume providing testing in the state.