A new False Claims Act suit against a south Florida home health agency is the first time the government has accused an agency of offering referring physicians’ spouses “sham marketing positions with the company to induce the physicians to refer Medicare patients for home health care services.”
Such potential kickback arrangements long have been an issue for the Home Care Association of Florida, which contends that in addition to being illegal, they represent unfair competition for HHA owners that avoid such arrangements.
The new Justice complaint against is based on a qui tam whistleblower suit under the False Claims Act that the agency’s former development director originally brought against A Plus Home Health Care in the government’s behalf. It alleges that the two-office HHA headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., began hiring spouses in 2006 “as part of a scheme to increase Medicare referrals in the heavily saturated home health care market of southern Florida.”
A Plus owner Tracy Nemerofsky, a former U.S. prosecutor, says she intends to contest the government’s charges as unfounded.
According to Justice, Nemerofsky’s agency eventually added at least seven physicians’ spouses and one physician’s boyfriend to its payroll to perform marketing duties “but required them to perform few, if any, actual job duties.” To cover up the scheme, owner Nemerofsky “generated sham personnel files, which included lists of job duties the spouses and boyfriend did not perform and performance reviews of job functions they did not complete, to give the false impression that the spouses and boyfriend were legitimate employees,” Justice alleges.