Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche unveiled indictments on Thursday against multiple individuals in Ohio accused of stealing over $50 million in government funds.
Blanche unsealed charges against 14 defendants, including state employees, during a press conference. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Director Mehmet Oz accused the suspects of defrauding taxpayers, including by corrupting publicly funded home healthcare and autism programs. Much of the alleged fraudulent activity occurred in Columbus, home to large Somalian, Nepalese, and Bhutanese populations.
“Ohio is facing some of the most significant fraud schemes in the country,” Blanche said. “It has crippled our taxpayer-funded programs and robbed the American purse for too long. Under the leadership of our great president and vice president, the days of the brazen theft that we’ve seen of taxpayer dollars, abusing the generosity of the American taxpayer, is over.”
A slew of other top officials attended the briefing, with FBI Director Kash Patel unveiling a new “Top 10 most wanted fraudsters” list, and Andrew Ferguson, vice chairman of the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, announcing Hawaii’s Medicaid fraud control unit was decertified due to concerns it has systemically failed to crack down on scammers.
As part of enforcement actions in Ohio, Kelly Loeffler, director of the Small Business Administration, announced suspensions for over 27,000 Ohio borrowers who she said were tied to over $1 billion in suspected Paycheck Protection Program fraud, or the illegal abuse of pandemic-era government relief loans. Oz said the government is suspending 49 Ohio home healthcare providers who’ve been identified as high-risk to the Medicaid program. He granted a six-month moratorium for all new home healthcare services and hospices in the state, and launched a state-specific Medicaid fraud “war room.”
Officials said Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is expanding partnerships with the federal government in “historic ways” to target scammers, including through a new data-sharing agreement that provides the fraud division access to corporate registrant data held by the state of Ohio. The data will be used in proactive data analysis to identify ownership links between clinics, labs, and billing entities that fraudsters use and hide behind to obscure control over fraud schemes, according to Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald.
Oz said the Columbus area generates one-third of the $1.5 billion flowing from home healthcare services in the state. The figure is three times “what you’d expect,” he said, suggesting that foreign-born populations are responsible for generating the fraud by bringing questionable practices common in their home countries to the area.
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“There’s a road very close to where we are, 288 home health care facilities in that several block area on that one road,” the CMS administrator told reporters. “It defies belief. Some of these buildings were vacant. You wouldn’t put anybody up in those buildings, not certainly the place that would house home healthcare.”
“This is a mecca for Somalian populations, it’s a hub for Nepalese and Bhutanese populations,” he added. “These are insular groups, but we are naive to think that practices that were felt to be commonplace in other parts of the world wouldn’t come to this great country if we didn’t pay attention to some of the program integrity issues, which were ignored en masse with the prior [Biden] administration.”