In her plea, Ms. Lovelace, a licensed occupational therapist, admitted that she began working around Sept. 2005 as a contract therapist for co-conspirator Suresh Chand, who entered a guilty plea in the same case in September.
Mr. Chand owned and controlled several companies operating in the Detroit area that purported to provide physical and occupational therapy services to Medicare beneficiaries. Ms. Lovelace admitted that she, Mr. Chand and others created fictitious therapy files appearing to document occupational therapy services provided to Medicare beneficiaries, when in fact no such services had been provided.
Ms. Lovelace admitted that her role in creating the fictitious therapy files was to sign documents and progress notes indicating she had provided occupational therapy services to particular Medicare beneficiaries, when in fact she had not. Ms. Lovelace was paid between $90 and $110 by Mr. Chand per file that she falsified. Ms. Lovelace also admitted that in the course of the scheme charged in the indictment, she signed approximately 544 fictitious occupational therapy files, falsely indicating she had provided occupational therapy services to Medicare beneficiaries.
In addition, Ms. Lovelace admitted that between approximately Sept. 2005 and Oct. 2006, Mr. Chand and his co-conspirators submitted claims to the Medicare program totaling approximately $2.8 million for files that were falsified by Ms. Lovelace. Medicare actually paid approximately $1.1 million on those claims.
In his plea, Mr. Pierce admitted that he was hired in March 2006 to recruit, drive and pay kickbacks to Medicare beneficiaries to induce them to go to Dearborn (Mich.) Medical Rehabilitation Center, an infusion clinic. The beneficiaries Mr. Pierce admitted to recruiting were paid to sign paperwork indicating that they had received infusions and injections of specialty medications that they did not in fact receive.
Mr. Pierce admitted that DMRC routinely billed the Medicare program for services that were medically unnecessary or were never provided. The primary owners and operators of DMRC, co-conspirators of Mr. Pierce, purchased only a small fraction of the medications that the clinic billed the Medicare program for providing. Patients were prescribed medications at the clinic based not on medical need, but instead based on which medications were likely to generate Medicare reimbursements.
Read the DOJ release on the Jaquita Lovelace and Timothy Pierce.
