Posts Tagged ‘crime’

Cavalier Greed And Cruelty In Minnesota

Wednesday, September 21st, 2022

Yesterday, Federal authorities charged 47 people in Minnesota with conspiracy and other counts in what prosecutors said is, to date, the largest fraud scheme of the COVID-19 pandemic, a scheme that stole at least $250 million from a federal program that provides meals to low-income children.

According to the Justice Department, “The 47 defendants are charged across six separate indictments and three criminal informations with charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering, and bribery.”

Government prosecutors allege the defendants created companies that claimed to be offering food to tens of thousands of children across Minnesota — nearly all of whom did not exist, — then sought reimbursement for those meals through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s food nutrition programs. Because the need was so great, some standards were waived and oversight was often minimal. The USDA allowed for-profit restaurants to participate, and allowed food to be distributed outside educational programs. The charging documents say the defendants exploited such changes “to enrich themselves.”

A non-profit called Feeding Our Future was central to the scheme.

The Federal Child Nutrition Program is used to feed low income children in daycare and afterschool organizations. It spends $4 billion a year to feed needy children across the country. Feeding Our Future received hundreds of millions of dollars from the program from 2019 through 2021.

Here’s how it worked.

The government alleges Feeding Our Future, a sponsor in the Federal Child Nutrition Program, established sponsorship contracts with nearly 200 federal child nutrition program sites throughout the state, knowing that the sites intended to submit fraudulent claims. The sites would submit the claims to Feeding Our Future, which would then submit them to the Minnesota Department of Education, which has historically administered the programs, primarily through school programs. With schools closed for the pandemic the rules of the nutrition programs were changed to allow for all of the new entrant providers and the relaxed rules.

Feeding Our Future became a sort of Third Party Administrator for the sham sites and collected 15% of the charges as its fee. It went from receiving and disbursing approximately $3.4 million in federal funds in 2019 to nearly $200 million in 2021.

According to the indictments, “The sites fraudulently claimed to be serving meals to thousands of children a day within just days or weeks of being formed and despite having few, if any, staff and little to no experience serving this volume of meals.”

The massive fraud was allegedly headed up by Aimee Bock, Feeding Our Future’s founder and executive director. The indictments also allege she and some of her employees received additional kickbacks, which were often disguised as “consulting fees” paid to shell companies Bock created.

Andy Luger, the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, said the fraudsters billed the government for more than 125 million fake meals. He displayed one Form For Reimbursement that claimed a site served exactly 2,500 meals each day Monday through Friday — with no children ever getting sick or otherwise missing a meal.

Luger said, “These children were simply invented.”

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice made prosecuting pandemic-related fraud a priority. The department has already taken enforcement actions related to more than $8 billion in suspected pandemic fraud, including bringing charges in more than 1,000 criminal cases involving losses in excess of $1.1 billion.

In this case, one of the indictments offered a beyond-brazen example of the fraud. It described a small storefront restaurant in Willmar, in west-central Minnesota, that typically served only a few dozen people a day. Two defendants offered the owner $40,000 a month to use his restaurant, then billed the government for some 1.6 million meals through 11 months of 2021. They listed the names of around 2,000 children — nearly half of the local school district’s total enrollment — and only 33 names matched actual students. And where did the defendants get the names of the children they said the program fed? From a website that randomly provides the names of mythical children. That’s where.

As usual in these kinds of fraud schemes the defendants used the stolen money to buy homes, exotic cars, vacation junkets and expensive clothes and jewelry.

And what did Minnesota’s low income children get? They got hunger.

 

 

 

Workers’ Comp Fraud: The Drobot Case Grinds On

Monday, November 30th, 2015

In late February, 2014, we wrote about the sordid tale of corruption perpetrated in southern California by Michael Drobot and his gang of thieves. Honor Sold, Trust Betrayed: Unbridled Greed In California describes the astonishing criminality of a large group of highly placed people whose job it was to care for others.

This from our original post:

Suppose you’re a doctor in California with a patient who complains that his back hurts a lot. Suppose further that Michael Drobot, the owner of California’s Pacific Health Corporation, will give you $15,000 if you refer your patient to his Pacific Hospital of Long Beach for lumbar fusion surgery, which may or may not be warranted. And what if Drobot’s Pacific Hospital were hundreds of miles away and that other qualified hospitals that wouldn’t pay you a kickback were much closer. What would you do?

The answer? Many doctors took the money and delivered up their patients to the Drobot surgical mill. Drobot paid the doctors in this scheme somewhere between $25 and $50 million.

Drobot’s two hospitals, Pacific Hospital of Long Beach and Tri-City Regional Medical Center in Hawaiian Gardens, billed thousands of mostly spinal fusion surgeries to California’s workers’ compensation system, the U.S. Department of Labor and workers’ compensation insurers. Over an eight year period, the hospitals were paid more than $500 million.

Drobot pleaded guilty in early 2014 to paying the kickbacks. He also pleaded guilty to bribing state Senator Ron Calderon to the tune of $100,000 for massaging the SB 863 legislation so that the fraud could continue for all of 2013. After his indictment in February, 2014, Calderon pleaded not guilty.

The wheels if justice have ground slowly but exceedingly fine in the nearly two years since. Former U. S. Attorney Andre Birotte, Jr., now a U. S. District Judge in California’s Central District, passed the baton to his replacement U.S. Attorney Eileen M. Decker. Last week Decker announced that Drobot’s CFO, James L. Canedo, and Paul Richard Randall, a “health care marketing recruiter” (he recruited doctors to refer patients in return for the illegal kickbacks) pleaded guilty to fraud, money laundering, conspiracy and other crimes. Also, two orthopedic surgeons, Philip Sobol of Studio City and Mitchell Cohen of Irvine, and Alan Ivar, a Las Vegas chiropractor who used to live in Southern California, have agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and other charges.

There will certainly be more to come in this tale of sleaze.

Work Comp Fraud Control, Barn Door Style

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015

A recent edition of 20/20 – Who’s Freeloading – deals with insurance. The first 12 or 13 minutes focuses on flagrant workers comp fraudsters caught in the act. The episode shows a worker with an alleged injured foot strutting the beauty pageant walkways; a worker incapacitated with a shoulder injury break dancing in a commercial; a “disabled” worker competing in extreme wrestling. While one might think someone deceiving their employer would have the street smarts to keep a low profile, this is often not the case. Many clueless fraudsters are caught in very public activities: See Caught on The Price is Right.

These cases are egregious and infuriating, particularly because the claimants are so brazen.
It’s worth noting that workers comp fraud comes in many flavors, and individual claimant fraud may be the tip of the iceberg: doctor mills, employer premium fraud and attorney fraud add up to much more in terms of sheer costs to the system.

Still, that can be cold comfort to an employer who deals with a fraudulent claim. It can feel very personal to to be duped and swindled by an employee.

We encourage employers who suspect fraud to work with their insurers to ferret it out – it should be a zero tolerance approach. But chasing down fraud after it occurs is still a case of “closing the barn door” style of management — the horse has already escaped.  In the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud’s Emerging Issues, Professor Malcolm Sparrow, a pre-eminent fraud expert from the JFK School of Government at Harvard University says it better:

There is widespread misplaced emphasis on detecting and investigating committed crimes, rather than on controlling, neutralizing, and deterring future crime. Despite some progress, the probability of detection and of criminal prosecution is still extremely small. The risk/reward ratio is still very attractive in insurance fraud — small risk with high reward. There is great potential in shifting the investment balance from heavily weighted identification of already committed crime — the “pay and chase” model — to more investment in detecting attempted fraud and defeating it.

We believe that vigilant employers can nip most fraud in the bud with a tight workers comp management program that focuses on preventing injury, treating employers fairly and compassionately when injuries do occur and closely monitoring the recovery process until return-to-work on full or transitional duty. By actively demonstrating vigilance repeatedly, opportunistic fraudsters may think twice and sophisticated fraudsters may choose an easier target. Here are some best practices:

  • Zero tolerance message. Educate employees about their rights and responsibilities under workers comp, and be clear that your intention is to care for anyone who is injured on the job, but that you aggressively prosecute fraud as a crime.
  • Publicize your return-to-work program. Establish and reinforce a goal of recovery and return-to-work for any work-related injuries.
  • Train supervisors. Your supervisors should understand workers comp and their role in the process. They should understand the employer/employee rights and responsibilities and what to do if an injury occurs. They should be alert for red flags.
  • Aim for same-day injury reporting. Train employees to report injuries immediately when they occur.
  • Conduct accident analyses. As soon as possible after a work injury or near miss, gather facts and witnesses while things are fresh. This will also set the stage for getting to the root cause and taking any remedial actions to prevent future occurrences.
  • Set the tone at point of injury. Escort an injured worker to the treating physician in your network. Remind them of rights / responsibilities and that you will be monitoring their recovery.
  • Keep in close touch with out-of-work injured employees. Let the employee know how important they are to the team. Have transitional work available that conforms with any restrictions and establish a return to work date.
  • Work with your insurer. Be familiar with “red flags” and report any suspicious activity immediately.

Fraud resources

10 “Red Flag” Warning Signs of Workers’ Compensation Fraud

10 ways for employers to fight workers’ comp fraud

Seven Steps You Can Take to Stop Workers’ Compensation Fraud

National Insurance Crime Bureau

Coalition Against Insurance Fraud

III – Insurance Fraud

Honor Sold, Trust Betrayed: Unbridled Greed in California

Wednesday, February 26th, 2014

“What is here?
Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?”

— Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare
Suppose you’re a doctor in California with a patient who complains that his back hurts a lot. Suppose further that Michael Drobot, the owner of California’s Pacific Health Corporation, will give you $15,000 if you refer your patient to his Pacific Hospital of Long Beach for lumbar fusion surgery, which may or may not be warranted. And what if Drobot’s Pacific Hospital were hundreds of miles away and that other qualified hospitals that wouldn’t pay you a kickback were much closer. What would you do?
It is illegal under both California and Federal law to pay doctors for referring patients to hospitals. Yet, according to Andre Birotte, Jr., U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, this is precisely what Drobot was doing on a massive scale in California from 2003 through 2008. The kickbacks amounted to between $20 million and $50 million. That was chump change compared to what Drobot netted from the surgeries. On Friday, Birotte announced that Drobot had pleaded guilty to paying the kickbacks in what amounted to a $500 million dollar fraud conspiracy and now faces up to 10 years in prison.
Drobot began building his health care empire in the mid-1990s. He bought a number of hospitals, but Pacific Hospital was his jewel in the crown. It was his “spine center,” and, according to U.S. Attorney Birotte, it is where doctors, who apparently think the Hippocratic Oath a mere suggestion, would refer patients for questionable lumbar fusion surgery at $15,000 per surgery. That is, unless the referral was for a cervical fusion, in which case the kickback was only $10,000. Needless to say, there were more lumbar fusions.
Workers compensation paid for all of this. More than 150 insurance companies were “ripped off,” according to Eric Weirich, Deputy Commissioner of the California Insurance Department’s Enforcement Branch.
The Los Angeles Times has been covering the Michael Drobot saga for the last 6 years. Drobot’s Pacific Health Corp. got itself out of big trouble in 2012 when it agreed to pay $16.5 million dollars to the government to avoid criminal conspiracy charges. From 2003 to 2008 it recruited homeless people, drove them to one of Pacific Health Corp’s hospitals and then charged Medicare and Medicaid for services never performed. The whole thing makes “ambulance chasing” look like a PBS donor acknowledgement.
But that little traipse into the dark side pales in comparison to the spinal fusion scheme.
In 2012, California SB 863 threatened to put more than a little crimp in Michael Drobot’s hose of money. Up until SB 863, Pacific Health Corp was paid highly inflated prices for both the surgeries and the surgical hardware, because it could charge duplicate invoices for the surgical implant hardware. The provisions of SB 863 would have severely limited duplicate payments beginning 1 January 2013. If Dobrot couldn’t collect the duplicate payments he wouldn’t be able to pay the kickbacks to get the patients he needed to keep the scheme going. He desperately wanted those provisions to be mitigated to some degree. To do that, he needed help.
He got it from friends in high places – the California Legislature. It’s a little murky as to method, but prior to final passage, SB 863 was changed to allow half the duplicate payments to continue, status quo, for all of 2013. The authorities have been looking into this, and U.S. Attorney Birotte has begun to reel in the fish.
The day before he indicted Michael Drobot, Birotte indicted state Senator Ron Calderon and his brother, former Assemblyman Tom Calderon, on 24 charges, including bribery and money laundering. Ron Calderon is alleged to have been paid more than $100,000 in bribes by Michael Drobot and in an FBI sting operation that Calderon thought was a film studio. If convicted, he faces up to 400 years in prison. And that’s the blood in the water that California’s media sharks now circle. Here’s an LA Times infographic of the Calderon family’s tree of connections and alleged corruption.
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However, as that great TV salesman, Ron Popeil, used to say, “But wait! There’s more!”
An FBI affidavit leaked to, of all places, Al Jazeera America, is making life uncomfortable for at least four other legislators, including Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg. Look deeply enough at this and one begins to think that Teapot Dome was nothing more than a benign business deal gone bad. (See the full associated Al Jazeera story: State Compensation Insurance Fund’s lawsuit against Michael Drobot)
Notwithstanding all of this, I keep coming back in my mind to those doctors, those chiropractors, those medical professionals who sold their souls and endangered their patients for all that “yellow, glittering, precious gold.” I ask, “Where is the outrage?” At some point, one hopes that U.S. Attorney Birotte turns his eyes to them.

News roundup: Risk Roundup, Wal-Mart Class Action, WCRI Report, Massey Probe Widens & more

Wednesday, November 28th, 2012

Risk Roundup – Emily Holbrook hosts Cavalcade of Risk #171 at Risk Management Monitor – be sure to check it out.
One to watch: Wal-Mart Class action & WC – In Business Insurance, Roberto Ceniceros writes about a Wal-Mart class action settlement that raises big workers comp questions. Josephine Gianzero et al. v. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. resulted in a settlement for 13,521 plaintiffs. It raises several issues of concern related to workers comp: the case was a breach of the exclusive remedy provision – an issue that is always of some concern to employers – and it raises questions about medical claims management.
According to Ceniceros: “The settlement involving Wal-Mart’s claims administration unit and Concentra Health Services Inc. in Colorado also is troubling since it is believed to be the first payout resulting from recent suits alleging that employers’ and workers comp service providers’ claims management practices violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, several observers say.”
This is quite the hot potato and of concern to TPAs, several of whom declined comment on the case. As Ceniceros reports, “The issue is sensitive because the lawsuit raises the question of how far claims administrators can pursue management of questionable medical treatments found through common practices, such as utilization reviews, without violating the law, the source said.”
(Here’s a summary of the case when the class action was certified in 2010.
How to keep injured workers from turning to lawyers – In the current issue of CFO, Richard Victor writes about a recent Workers Compensation Research Institute (WCRI) study that sheds light on why injured workers feel the need to hire an attorney: How to Keep Unneeded Lawyers Out of Workers’ Comp . It’s a good article and worth the read – here’s a snippet:

“Not surprisingly, the study found that workers are more likely to seek attorneys when they feel threatened. Sources of perceived threats can take different forms. The character of the employment relationship, for example, was a factor for the 23% who strongly agreed that they hired attorneys because they feared being fired or laid off. Fifteen percent also strongly agreed that they needed attorneys because their employer could perceive their claims as illegitimate.

Miscommunication in the claims process was another significant factor. In fact, 46% said they hired attorneys because they felt the claim had been denied when, in fact, it had not yet been accepted into the process. Attorney involvement among workers with the most severe injuries were 15 percentage points higher than those with mostly minor injuries.”

Related: We refer you to one of our favorite articles on the topic by plaintiff attorney Alan S. Pierce: Top Ten List as to Why Injured Workers Retain Attorneys
More Charges; Big Branch Probe Widens – Ken Ward reports that today, federal prosecutors have charged a longtime Massey Energy mine manager with being part of a decade-long conspiracy to defy safety laws and dupe government inspectors. Expect more to come:

But in new court documents, Goodwin and Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Ruby allege a broader conspiracy by as-yet unnamed “directors, officers, and agents” of Massey operating companies to put coal production ahead of worker safety and health at “other coal mines owned by Massey.”

It is the first time in their probe of the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster that prosecutors have filed charges alleging Massey officials engaged in a scheme that went beyond the Raleigh County mine where 29 workers died in an April 2010 explosion.

Follow the ongoing story and find links to other coverage at Ward’s Coal Tattoo blog.
Pharma Costs – Joe Paduda links to and comments on a recent Express Scripts drug trends report. The long and short of it? Pharmacy price increases are driven by brands.
Fighting Fraud – Southern California has 65 billboards warning about work comp fraud. To raise public awareness or criminal penalties associated with fraud, the boards will be placed on billboards and transit shelter posters placed across San Diego County.
Strange Risks – Can you insure against acne attacks or hair loss? Lori Widmer has an entertaining read in this month’s Risk Management Magazine: The Stranger Side of Risk.
Other noteworthy items

Pennsylvania: Crime Wave in a Bureaucracy

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

The Insider does not normally think of state workers comp insurance funds as hubs of criminal activity, but then again, we haven’t been to Scranton lately. James McDonnell, 53, is a supervisor in the State Workers’ Insurance Fund (SWIF). He makes about $51,000 a year – at least, that’s his declared income. He has apparently been pulling in a whole lot more than that. He was arrested this week for running a kickback scheme involving premium discounts for Pennsylvania employers. In exchange for (undocumented) discounts in premiums owed, McDonnell secured cash kickbacks of one third to one half the discount. Between 1999 and 2011, McDonnell and his wife pulled in at least $80,000.
WorkCompCentral (subscription required) offers additional background on this case, including PDFs of the criminal indictment. McDonnell offered premium discounts to individual employers, in one case, a roofer, whose premiums, instead of going up $50K, came down $10K. He then insisted that the roofer join one of the three staffing firms with whom he did business. In exchange for steering clients their way, these firms paid McDonnell a relatively modest 1% commission, in addition to paying him substantial cash kickbacks on the premium discounts. In honor of family values, McDonnell’s wife was given several jobs which apparently did not require that she perform any work.
Kickbacks and Harassment
McDonnell must have been a busy man, systematically exploiting his position with SWIF, but he allegedly found time to harass a fellow fund employee. Last September he was accused of “making sexual advances on the employee, identified only as Jane Doe, such as asking her to lick a piece of Twizzlers candy taken from her work desk before he ate it and telling her to bend over and pick up a time sheet he dropped to the ground.” Would you be shocked to learn that the fund did not take these accusations seriously?
There may well be slow days at a typical state fund, but McDonnell sure knew how to make time fly. That skill will come in handy when and if he finds himself doing time in a bureaucracy of a different sort altogether.
Comp fraud takes many forms and encompasses opportunities for each and every stakeholder in the system: doctors, lawyers, insurers, state bureaucrats, business people, workers and, I suppose, even consultants. Today’s little saga of greed arises from the midst of a state bureaucracy. But no matter where the crime originates, the result is the same: higher costs for the vast majority of people who play by the rules.

Dr. Paul Volkman: The People’s Pusher

Tuesday, February 21st, 2012

Dr. Paul Volkman specialized in mitigation of pain. Did he ever. From 2003 to 2005 he was the most prolific prescriber of Oxycodone and related opioids in the entire country. He was recently sentenced to four life terms in prison for the deaths of four patients. There were eight additional overdose deaths associated with his practice, but these lacked enough evidence to prosecute. Patients came from hundreds of miles away and were charged $125 to $200 in cash for visits to see a doctor. Volkman’s distribution system had a devastating effect on southern Ohio, where he based his practice.
Prosecutors said Volkman rarely, if ever, counseled patients on alternate treatments for pain, such as physical therapy, surgery or addiction counseling. Volkman denied the allegations and said he always acted in good faith. A month before his conviction, he dismissed his attorneys and defended himself. His skills as an attorney appear to be totally in sync with his skills as a physician.
Street Creds and Credentials
Volkman went to work at the Tri-State Health Care and Pain Management clinic in southern Ohio in 2003. The clinic was operated by Denise Huffman and her daughter Alice Huffman Ball, who have pled guilty to one count of operating Tri-State as a business whose primary goal was the illegal distribution of prescription drugs. Denise has been sentenced to 12 plus years in prison; her daughter is serving five years. Both testified against Volkman, as did a horde of witnesses including pharmacists, police investigators, clinic employees and patients who received pills from Volkman.
What is striking about this case is the harsh sentencing. Four life terms is the kind of sentence you rarely see applied to white collar criminals; Volkman was sentenced as if he were a run-of-the-mill (pun intended) drug kingpin, which, minor differences aside, he was.
Through the wonders of the internet, we learn that Volkman had a three star rating from his patients and earned his medical degree at the University of Chicago Pritzger School of Medicine in 1974, followed by a residency at Duke Medical Center. After that, well, something went terribly wrong. Nonetheless, with his impressive creds, he’s sure to be a very popular man for the rest of his highly circumscribed life.

A Window Into Fraud

Monday, February 13th, 2012

A couple of years ago we blogged the performance incentive program at Smurfit-Stone Container Corporation in California. The performance numbers were stellar, but not necessarily because the work was performed safely. Instead, the company conspired with local medical providers to secure limited treatment outside of the workers comp system. Two supervisors pled no contest in conspiring to deny comp benefits to injured workers.
With the recent conviction of chiropractor Robert Schreiner, we see into the black box of the conspiracy. Workers complaining of work-related problems were referred to doctors like Schreiner – giving rise, alas, to a new and ominous definition of provider network. In one instance a worker complained about a neck and shoulder injury. Schreiner denied that the problem was work related, saying that it was caused by carrying a back pack as a child. He provided a handful of treatments and then encouraged the worker to file the claim under his health plan to continue treatments. When the worker persisted and filed a comp claim, he was fired.
Schreiner is headed to jail to serve a mostly symbolic sentence of 30 days, to be followed by three years of probation. Perhaps he can provide some adjustments to his fellow inmates. Confined spaces sure can mess up the spine.
Faking Safety
Smurfit-Stone was bought out last year by RockTenn. You can still read about the company in Wikipedia. Here is the (unattributed) description of the company’s safety program:

Smurfit-Stone has been an industry leader in safety performance since 2001 [NOTE: the conspiracy to under-report claims began in 1999!]. In 2007, Smurfit-Stone’s U.S. operations had an OSHA recordable case rate of 1.05, the best in company and industry history. This represents an 84 percent improvement in the company’s recordable case rate since the implementation of Smurfit-Stone’s SAFE process in 1995.The SAFE process, which stands for Smurfit-Stone Accident-Free Environment, promotes five core beliefs:
1.All injuries are preventable
2.Safety is everyone’s responsibility
3.Working safely is a condition of employment
4.Training employees to work safely is essential
5.Safety is good business

As litigation has proven, Smurfit-Stone’s low OSHA case rate has less to do with safety than with a conspiracy to under-report claims. Perhaps the SAFE program stood for something else: Screw All Forsaken Employees. Aggressive safety goals are a good business practice; circumventing the workers comp system is not just a bad practice, it’s illegal. Just ask Robert Schreiber.

Holiday Health Wonk Review, news notes, and holiday humor

Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

Gary Schwitzer makes his hosting debut with Unwrapping early presents, wrapping up ’11 Health Wonk Review series. Gary is the publisher of the excellent HealthNewsReview.org and its associated Health News Watchdog blog – take a look around while you are there.
Absence Management – The Disability Management Employers Coalition and Liberty Mutual recently released a set of best practice for absence management and easing the transition back to work after a disability leave. Download a whitepaper on Best Practices in Return to Work or view Taming the Intermittent Beast, a one-hour webinar on managing intermittent leave.
Support a good guy – Joe Paduda explains why you should join the Friends of Sandy Blunt on LinkedIn.
Desperate Housewives – Reality just got a little harsher for a would-be reality TV star caught in a huge California workers comp scam, She and her husband were charged with $30 million in premium fraud. “The couple gained notoriety in 2010 after fraud investigators raided several properties they owned and found luxury cars including a Bentley, two Ferraris, $500,000 in jewelry and $51,000 in cash. They also found an application for Kile to appear on the television show.”
Going and coming – Injuries that occur while traveling to and from work generally are not compensable. There are several common exceptions to this “going and coming” rule – if an employer provides transportation, if traveling is part of the normal course and scope of an employee’s job (such as a salesperson), or if the employee is on a “special mission” for the employer. Risk and Insurance reports on a recent benefit denial by the New Jersey Superior Court, Appellate Division in a case where a company president was invoking the “special mission” exception for an injury that occurred during an early trip to work for a special meeting. In denying the appeal, the court reasoned that the exception did not apply because the president was not required to be away from the restaurant’s usual place of business and he did not have “identifiable time and space limits on his employment.”
Up in smoke – Roberto Ceniceros posts about a denied claim involving a landscaper injured after a fall from a tree. Ceniceros notes that, “A urine sample taken at the hospital the day after the Tennessee man fell showed he had an intoxicant level 50 times beyond the threshold for a positive result, leading a doctor to describe him as a chronic pot user.” The court concluded that while the employee was not guilty of willful misconduct, his intoxication was a proximate cause of the injuries.
Hope for PTSD relief?Wired has an interesting article on a how the Navy is testing neck injections to relieve PTSD. The unorthodox procedure, which is called stellate-ganglion block (SGB), has secured immediate relief for some PTSD sufferers.
NYWCB Web change – Effective December 20, the New York State Workers’ Compensation Board (WCB) updated its website to use the standard “ny.gov” domain naming convention – the new web address is www.wcb.ny.gov. WorkersCompensation.com has more detail about related email changes.
On the lighter side: Holiday roundup
In honor of the holiday season, we’ve put together a grab bag of some fun holiday links. We wish all our friends the best for the season!

Annals of Fraud: Pickells in a Pickle

Monday, August 15th, 2011

Kevin and Bob Pickell ran KDN Lanchester Insurance Agency in Sinking Spring PA. It’s not just the spring that’s sunk. The not-so-kissing cousins (bad day photos here) have been convicted of diverting workers comp premium payments from area school systems into their own pockets.
As fraud goes, agents pocketing premiums is pretty dreary stuff: it’s not a matter of if, but when they get caught. In this case, the carrier notified one of the schools that premiums had not been paid. In jumps the state attorney general, with the result that the Pickells are going to prison for over a year, followed by restitution and 20 years of probation.
The cousins do not appear to be planning a return to the brokerage business. They have offered the domain site (kdnins.com) for sale. Let’s see. Brokers in jail, a bit of bad press. Not exactly a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity.
Many good folks testified to the character of the defendants. They were known for their generosity in the community, along with living the lavish life style that inevitably accompanies this type of crime: big houses, fancy cars, expensive wines…
Opportunities for Fraud
Agents are just one of a number of parties in the workers comp system who see opportunities for making money the fast and not-exactly-legal way. Along with agents we have:
Employees:
• Faking injuries
• Lying about health problems that impact their ability to perform jobs safely
• Exaggerating symptoms to prolong disability (malingering)
• Being injured away from work and claiming the injury is work related
• Working a second job (usually under the table) while still collecting indemnity
Employers:
• Under-reporting payroll
• Misclassifying employees as “independent contractors”
• Misclassifying employees into lower risk – and lower premium – job classes
• Failing to report injuries
• Threatening employees who do report injuries
Doctors:
• Billing insurance companies for treatments not provided
• Exaggerating the nature of services provided
• Performing unnecessary tests
• Selling drugs (pain killers) to injured workers
• Conspiring with attorneys by faking diagnoses of compensable injuries
Attorneys:
• Helping workers exaggerate medical symptoms to secure benefits (providing unnecessary neck braces, crutches, slings, etc.)
• Coaching injured workers on malingering
• Helping workers develop a false “injury narrative”
• Stealing settlement dollars (very rare)
Claims adjusters:
• Securing kick-backs on medical or indemnity payments
• Setting up phony claims and pocketing payments
Investment companies:
• Bribing public officials to secure dollars for investment (see the “Coingate” scandal in Ohio)
• Offering (illegal) perks to decision makers who manage public dollars
Despite the myriad opportunities for fraud in the comp system, outright fraud is still relatively rare. The vast majority of transactions within the system, involving all of the above players in every state across the nation, are carried out with integrity and good faith. Nonetheless, eternal vigilance is necessary to ensure that comp dollars are spent prudently, wisely and fairly.