A Lawrenceville woman is accused of submitting fraudulent claims for cancer, COVID-19 and other types of tests in an effort to defraud the Medicare program, federal authorities said.
Ashley Hoobler Parris, 32, was arrested Friday morning, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia said in a news release. She's charged by complaint with conspiring to violate the Anti-Kickback Statute and conspiring to commit health care fraud.
The scheme began around October 2018 and continued until recently, the release said.
Authorities said Parris received illegal kickbacks from diagnostic testing facilities in exchange for referring Medicare patients to their labs for testing. Initially, the tests were cancer genetic tests (CGX), which the patients were not eligible to have reimbursed through Medicare, the release said.
CGX testing uses DNA sequencing to detect mutations in genes that could indicate whether someone is at a higher risk of developing certain types of cancer, the release said. It is not a method used to detect and diagnose cancer.
Medicare reimburses the costs for those tests only under certain circumstances, which includes that the tests must be ordered by the physician who is treating the patient who qualifies for Medicare.
Parris was illegally sending those patients to labs and having them complete the genetic tests, whether they needed them or not, the release said. Co-conspirators at the labs would then pay her illegal kickbacks for sending the patients their way, authorities said.
Her co-conspirators were not named, and authorities did not say how much Parris and her co-conspirators allegedly received in illegal kickbacks.
In February, she’s accused of taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Parris began to receive illegal kickbacks on a per-test basis for COVID-19 tests and Respiratory Pathogen Panel (RPP) tests, the release said. The reimbursement rates for RPP tests are about four times higher than the reimbursement rates for COVID-19 tests.
The Office of the Inspector General within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services investigated the case, with assistance from the Atlanta Regional Office and the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, the release said.
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