Home Health & Hospice Week

Watchdog agency isn’t letting this recommendation go.

A major home health agency burden nearly tops the latest list of fraud-fighting recommendations from the HHS Office of Inspector General.

In its “2018 Solutions to Reduce Fraud, Waste, and Abuse in HHS Programs: Top Unimplemented Recommendations” report, the OIG urges the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to “implement the statutory mandate requiring surety bonds for home health agencies that enroll in Medicare and consider implementing the requirement for other providers,” the OIG says. “CMS could have recovered at least $39 million in uncollected overpayments between 2007 and 2011 if it had required home health agencies to obtain $50,000 in surety bonds.”

The recommendation comes in at number-two on the OIG’s 25-item list.

The OIG has been beating the HHA surety bond drum pretty loudly over the past year. The “doc fix” bill signed into law in April 2015 contained a $50,000 surety bond provision for home health agencies (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XXIV, No. 15). The $50K figure was a minimum, with the amount going up corresponding to HHAs’ revenues.

Over the past nine months, the OIG has featured the surety bond recommendation in its Semiannual

Report to Congress, Top Management Challenges and Performance Challenges report, and Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Program report.

Note: The Unimplemented Recommendations report is online at https://oig.hhs.gov/reports-and-publications/compendium/index.asp.