Takatz, who lives in Wentzville, said she originally took the job to help people obtain health care.

“I feel guilty for working there as long as I did,” she said. “It was like I was stealing money from people.”

Takatz said that when she and other employees looked for applications to process, they called it fishing because they were trying to catch an application before someone at another processing center could.

Employees refreshed their pages so frequently that Serco limited them to one refresh per 10 minutes. If workers refreshed more than that, they were called into a supervisor’s office and told to stop.

In the whole month of December, she said, she processed about six applications.

Workers became so bored and hostile, Takatz claims, that Serco began providing books to read. Employees were told they could not speak to the media, even if they left the company.

“It was prison,” Takatz said. “We all referred to it as our cell blocks.”