Man sentenced for Medicaid fraud
By From staff reports
Published in News on December 19, 2016 9:57 AM
The United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina announced this month that in federal court, Donnie Lee Phillips II, 37, of Greenville, was sentenced to 108 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release following his prior guilty plea to health care fraud conspiracy and aggravated identity theft.
Phillips was also ordered to make restitution of $5,722,364 to the victims of the offense, which included the North Carolina Medicaid program and a physician, whose name and identification number Phillips and other conspirators used to commit the fraud.
Phillips was further ordered to forfeit certain proceeds of the fraud, including a truck, boat, and boat trailer.
The case is related to a prior health care fraud and money laundering case against Terry Lamont Speller of Greenville.
Speller was previously sentenced in March to 20 years in federal prison for his role in the conspiracy.
According to the Criminal Information to which Phillips pleaded guilty, as well as information provided at the sentencing
hearing, between 2013 and 2015, Phillips fraudulently billed the Medicaid program and Medicaid Managed Care Organizations for
services that were not, in fact, provided by various outpatient behavioral health providers.
Phillips transmitted false billings on behalf of various individuals in the scheme and, in the process, fraudulently utilized the identities of more than 2,000 minor children.
Before being caught carrying out the fraud on audiotape by a confidential informant, Phillips assisted participating providers to fraudulently acquire more than $5 million. For his role in the scheme, Phillips received around $300,000.
Phillips was arrested on a warrant after investigators captured him on audiotape coordinating the billing fraud with another Medicaid provider. Phillips later pleaded guilty to the charges of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and aggravated
identity theft contained in the criminal information.
"When fraudsters like Donnie Lee Phillips bill Medicare and Medicaid for services never provided just to enrich themselves, the integrity of these taxpayer-funded health care programs is at risk," said special agent in charge Derrick L. Jackson of the department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General. "The sentence handed down in this case is a warning that health care fraud will not be tolerated."
The investigation of this case was conducted by agents of the state Bureau of Investigation assigned to the Medicaid investigations division of the North Carolina Attorney General's Office; The Internal Revenue Service criminal investigation unit and the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services Office of the Inspector General.