By Rebecca S. Green
Fort Wayne Journal Gazette
FORT WAYNE, Ind. — A Fort Wayne woman was sentenced to a year in federal prison after she admitted to bilking Indiana Medicaid out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Kateen Morris, 44, was the principal and billing agent for M&M Transportations and which became K.A.T.S., LLC.
The company provided transportation services, including medical transportation for Medicaid beneficiaries around Fort Wayne, according to court documents.
Last week, U.S. District Judge William T. Lawrence in Indianapolis sentenced Morris to 12 months in federal prison on a single count of health care fraud. Morris will be on supervised release for a period of two years after she serves her prison sentence and will need to make $394,213 in restitution to Medicaid, according to court documents.
In March 2010, a federal grand jury meeting in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana in Indianapolis indicted Morris on a single count of health care fraud. She pleaded guilty to the charge in July, according to court records.
A request for a search warrant into the K.A.T.S. offices at 7705 Auburn Road was filed in October 2009.
According to court documents, the state’s administrator of the Medicaid program submitted information to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about K.A.T.S.’ billing practices.
Specifically, it appeared the company was billing all of its Medicaid patients as if they received four one-way transports a day, and included a guardian and an additional attendant on the trips, according to court documents.
That resulted in a billing of more than four times the reimbursement rate per patient than a typical transport, according to court documents.
Investigators also found that Morris was billing more transports than they actually administered. Most of the patients transported by the company suffered from severe medical or physical impairments and were spending time at daycare facilities that required only one round-trip per day, according to court documents.
She sent out about 5,000 false billing statements between June 2008 and October 2009, according to court documents and a release from the office of U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Hogsett.
The result was a loss of more than $394,000, according to court documents.
So far, the government has recovered $337,999 from the company’s bank accounts, according to court documents.
“This punishment should serve as a powerful warning as to how seriously our office takes any allegation of government fraud or waste,” Hogsett said in a written statement. “We will continue to work with our federal and state law enforcement partners to punish those who prey on Hoosier taxpayers and Medicaid patients with the full force of federal law.”
Copyright 2011 The Journal-Gazette