Vanessa Roberts Avery, United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut, announced that Jeffrey Slocum, 56, of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Stefan R. Underhill in Bridgeport to three years of probation, the first 12 months of which he must serve in home confinement under electronic monitoring, for health care fraud and kickback offences.
According to court documents and statements made in court, from 2017 to 2022, Slocum, a former resident of East Lyme, Connecticut, was a licensed professional counsellor with an office located at 300 State Street in New London.
In 2020, the Connecticut Medicaid program notified Slocum that Medicaid was going to audit certain claims for psychotherapy services Slocum had billed to Medicaid between March 2018 and February 2020. As part of its audit, Medicaid requested patient records for approximately 100 individual psychotherapy services Slocum had billed to Medicaid.
In March 2021, Medicaid notified Slocum that the audit had determined that he had received over $225,000 in payments from Medicaid for services that he had not documented. Medicaid told Slocum it would begin to collect the overpayment by deducting the overpayment in instalments from future payments Medicaid would make to Slocum.
Once Slocum learned the results of the audit and that he would have to pay the money back to Medicaid, he began submitting fraudulent claims to Medicaid for psychotherapy services that he never provided. Slocum’s fraudulent claims to Medicaid represented that he had personally provided the nonexistent services.
Slocum also engaged in a scheme to pay kickbacks to his Medicaid patients to induce them to receive psychotherapy services from him. Slocum paid these kickbacks to patients through cash payments, money orders, and Wal-Mart and VISA gift cards.
Judge Underhill ordered Slocum to pay restitution of $695,048 to Medicaid.
On August 16, 2023, Slocum pleaded guilty to one count of healthcare fraud and one count of violating the federal anti-kickback statute.
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