Home Health & Hospice Week

Medicare fraud isn’t the only kind of crime that can bring down home health agency execs.

Case in point: A Louisiana federal jury recently convicted a HHA chief operating officer and a chief financial officer/ controller of bank fraud in a check kiting scheme, the Department of Justice says. Charlie L. Simpson, COO of United Home Care Inc., and Charles D. Gardner, CFO of Trinity Home Health Care Inc., “orchestrated and executed a check kiting scheme between accounts at Origin Bank and [Louisiana National Bank] wherein they deposited hundreds of checks between multiple accounts they controlled at both banks and took advantage of the float when they passed the checks, timing the exchanges to artificially inflate the account balances,” the DOJ explains. “As a result of this scheme, Simpson and Gardner caused Origin Bank and LNB to honor checks and payments drawn against accounts with insufficient funds and put the financial institutions at risk.”

They then went further, the feds charge. To “prevent the kite from collapsing … Simpson and Gardner added a third bank, Peoples Bank, into the scheme by issuing over 20 checks for approximately $4 million … and deposited them into multiple accounts at Origin Bank. However, the accounts used at Peoples Bank had less than $2,000 available,” the DOJ relates. Origin Bank suffered a financial loss as a result, according to the release. Simpson and Gardner are scheduled for sentencing in August.