A former Hewlett-Packard employee was sentenced to 20 years this week after pleading guilty to routing nearly $9 million in Medicaid payments to prepaid debit card accounts she controlled.
The state attorney general’s office said Romona Ferrell-Davis, who worked for H-P as a fiscal intermediary serving the state Department of Community Health, changed bank routing and account numbers of four Medicaid providers and directed funds to the three accounts she controlled. The DCH runs the state’s Medicaid program.
Prosecutors said in a release that the East Point woman managed to commit the fraud because she had access to the Georgia Medicaid Management Information System at H-P. Two of the prepaid card accounts were in her name and a third was in the name of a Medicaid member, whose account information was illegally accessed.
Ferrell-Davis was indicted by a DeKalb County grand jury in December 2011 after an investigation was launched two months earlier. H-P said it fired the contract worker.
She pleaded guilty Monday in DeKalb County Superior Court to four counts of computer theft, one count of computer invasion of privacy and one count of identity fraud.
State Judge Cynthia Becker ordered Ferrell-Davis to spend three years of her sentence in prison and she was ordered to pay restitution.
With the help of debit card providers, the DCH was able to recover all but $17,533 of the $8,828,972 Ferrell-Davis had appropriated, prosecutors said.
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