{"id":55408,"date":"2024-01-31T18:19:55","date_gmt":"2024-02-01T02:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cjnotebook.com\/?p=55408"},"modified":"2024-01-31T18:19:55","modified_gmt":"2024-02-01T02:19:55","slug":"calif-man-sentenced-to-10-years-in-prison-for-billing-medicare-for-234-million-for-covid-19-related-tests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cjnotebook.com\/?p=55408","title":{"rendered":"Calif. Man Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison for Billing Medicare for $234 Million for COVID-19-Related Tests"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"A California man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for conspiring to conceal his involvement in operating a laboratory and fraudulently billing Medicare approximately $234 million for various lab tests, officials stated.<\/span><\/p>\n

This includes COVID-19 and respiratory pathogen panel tests, despite his decades-long exclusion from the Medicare program.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCriminals who cheat federal health programs and profit at the expense of American taxpayers will be met with the full force of the Justice Department,\u201d said U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. \u201cAs our country was battling the COVID-19 pandemic, this individual was fraudulently billing Medicare for hundreds of millions of dollars. Today, thanks to the work of the Justice Department\u2019s Criminal Division, he will now spend ten years in federal prison for his crimes. We will continue to disrupt schemes that defraud the federal health programs the American people rely on, and we will hold accountable those who perpetrate those schemes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

According to court documents, Imran Shams, 65, of Glendale, was convicted of Medicare and Medicaid fraud in separate 1990 and 2001 cases in New York and California, respectively. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"After each conviction, he was excluded from participation in Medicare and all federal health care programs and advised by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG) that he had to submit a written application to be considered for reinstatement in federal health care programs. <\/span><\/p>\n

Shams never sought reinstatement, yet he continued to operate health care clinics in New York that billed federal health care programs. <\/span><\/p>\n

In November 2017, Shams pleaded guilty to conspiracy to pay and receive health care kickbacks and other charges in the Eastern District of New York related to his operation of these clinics.<\/span><\/p>\n

By 2018, Shams was an owner, operator, and manager of Matias Clinical Laboratory, doing business as Health Care Providers Laboratory (HCPL), a Baldwin Park, California-based clinical testing laboratory that billed Medicare and other federal health care programs.<\/span><\/p>\n

To maintain HCPL\u2019s status as a Medicare provider and enable it to receive payments from Medicare for its testing services, Shams and a co-conspirator fraudulently concealed Shams\u2019 role in HCPL from Medicare.<\/span><\/p>\n

This included the following things:<\/span><\/p>\n