It should be a relief to honest citizens to know that bankruptcy isn’t simply a get-out-of-jail-free card for fraudsters. According to KentReporter.com, Washington state authorities rolled right over a man who willingly endangered poor and disabled patients when he provided them with used wheelchairs that he falsely claimed were new.
The report details how the man “cobbled together” mismatched parts (including soiled pads and cushions—yuck!) from used wheelchairs that he purchased for a couple hundred dollars. To make each chair appear new, he would repaint it and apply a phony serial number. (I’m all for recycling, but not as part of someone’s get-rich-quick fraud scheme.) He then would provide the chairs to Medicaid patients and send wildly inflated bills to the state-subsidized health care program, under the guise that the chairs were “new.” He illegally collected more than $550,000 in Medicaid payments through the scam.
What’s even worse is that he attempted to protect these “assets” by filing for bankruptcy, after authorities caught on and filed a $2.7 million civil judgment against him in an attempt to recover the fraudulently acquired funds. A judge ruled that this fraudster would not be permitted to use bankruptcy to get out of paying the judgment. (It goes without saying that the government, generally, is not going to react well to further attempts to exploit it, after you’ve already been caught pilfering its pockets.)
When all was said and done, the man was ordered to pay the government the full $2.7 million judgment for wrongfully billing Medicaid for 119 wheelchairs. In a separate criminal case filed by the Washington state Attorney General’s Office, he was convicted of one count of first-degree theft and two counts of Medicaid false statement—both felonies.
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