Home Health & Hospice Week

Government watchdogs are raking in the dough from fraud enforcement, and the federal government is cheering these successes. During the last three years, for every $1 spent on healthcare fraud and abuse investigations, the federal government recovered $7.90, according to a Feb. 11 announcement from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

This is the highest return-on-investment in the 16-year history of the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Program. For fiscal year 2012, government fraud-fighting teams raked in a record-breaking $4.2 billion worth of fraud recoveries, HHS and the U.S. Department of Justice announced. And since 1997, the HCFAC Program returned more than $23 billion to the Medicare Trust Funds.

HHS and the DOJ released these figures in its annual HCFAC Program report, which monitors spending and enforcement recoveries by various government agencies and fraud-fighting teams, such as the Health Care Fraud Prevention Enforcement Action Team and the nine Medicare Fraud Strike Force teams.

Among the report’s highlighted successes for FY2012 was the bust of a Texas physician and the office manager of his medical practice, along with five HHA owners. This was the single largest fraud scheme orchestrated by one physician in the history of HEAT and the Medicare Fraud Strike Force operation.