Bribery
Chief
Financial Officer Pleads Guilty to Soliciting and Receiving Kickbacks for
Referrals
Vic Wadhwa faces 5 years in prison for
receiving $460,000 in kickbacks from laboratory testing company.
Published:
December 18, 2014
Category:
The chief financial officer of a group
of pain management clinics in Maryland pleaded guilty earlier this week to
soliciting and receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from a
laboratory testing company, the FBI announced.
Vic
Wadhwa, of Frederick Md., pleaded guilty to arranging a deal with a lab company
in New Jersey to receive nearly half a million dollars in kickbacks for sending
thousands of patients' urine samples to the lab for testing, the FBI said. Mr.
Wadhwa faces a maximum of 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
According
to the federal government, the pain management clinics required patients taking
pain medications to submit urine samples as a way of monitoring levels of
medication in their bodies. This generated hundreds of urine samples a month,
the FBI said, which ranged in cost from $200 to $2,000 to test.
In his plea deal, Mr. Wadhwa said that
in March 2011, he and some of his colleagues decided to start using a
laboratory testing company in New Jersey for these patient samples, after
learning the company was willing to pay kickbacks to facilities for sending
specimens. Mr. Wadhwa said he negotiated an agreement that said the lab company
would pay kickbacks equal to half of
its profit for every urine sample submitted for testing.
From
March 2011 to August 2012, the clinics sent samples to the lab company, with
the lab receiving more than $4 million from private insurers, Medicare and the
Federal Employees Health Benefit Program, according to the FBI. Between July
2011 and August 2012, the lab company paid the clinics a almost $1.4 million in
kickbacks, with Mr. Wadhwa receiving nearly $460,000 of that.
A
sentencing hearing for Mr. Wadhwa is scheduled for April 2015. The
investigation is ongoing, the FBI said. An attorney was not listed for Mr.
Wadhwa.
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