Home Health & Hospice Week

Medicare fraud isn’t the only kind of fraud home care providers can get busted for.

Case in point: Lance Ashley, owner of Ashley Home Care Services in Overland Park, Kansas, “did not pay over to the IRS all the federal tax withholdings collected from the wages of AHCS’s employees. Instead, he used some of the funds to pay corporate and personal expenses,” the Department of Justice says in a release.

“After the IRS initiated enforcement efforts in 2016 to collect AHCS’s unpaid employment taxes, Ashley provided fraudulent bank records to the IRS, did not fully disclose all of the company’s bank accounts, filed false IRS forms and attempted to use a recently formed corporation to conceal AHCS’s operations,” the DOJ says. “In total, Ashley’s conduct caused a tax loss to the IRS exceeding $321,000.”

Ashley was sentenced to a year in prison, two years of supervised release, and $321,000 in restitution, according to the DOJ.

Another example: Ashley Nicole Brown, owner of an unlicensed home health company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a former employee of another home health company, has pleaded guilty to embezzling her coworkers’ payroll funds and their health insurance subsidies, the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office says in a release. “Even after being charged with the crimes in the earlier case, Brown proceeded to operate an unlicensed home health care company,” the AG notes.

Brown then “used her position of trust to obtain [elderly clients’] personal identification information and their bank account debit card numbers. Brown used the victims’ personal information and debit cards without their permission to pay off her personal debts, to pay her family members, and to pay her company,” according to the release.

A state judge sentenced Brown to 10 years, with seven years in prison and the following three years under the supervision of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections Probation and Parole, the AG says. As a condition of her probation, Brown agreed to not own, manage, or work in the Oklahoma health care industry while on probation, and to pay restitution as well as all fines, fees, and assessments associated with her cases.