Excel Hospice Owner Sentenced to 18 Months for Fraud, Kickbacks

A federal court has sentenced Liana Karapetyan, former co-owner of California-based ANG Health Care, Excel Hospice, and Excel Home Healthcare, to 18 months in prison for hospice fraud and anti-kickback violations.

The US. Department of Justice filed charges against Karapetyan and her husband Akop Atoyan last year. Atoyan was co-owner of the hospice and home health businesses and has pled guilty for his role in the scheme.

“In total, Atoyan, Karapetyan and others caused the agencies to submit over 8,000 claims to Medicare for the cost of home health care and hospice services. Based on those claims, Medicare paid the agencies approximately $31 million,” the U.S. Justice Department indicated in a statement. “Because the agencies obtained the beneficiary referrals by paying kickbacks, the agencies should not have received any Medicare reimbursement.”

Advertisement

The couple allegedly paid $2 million in kickbacks to multiple parties in exchange for Medicare beneficiary referrals, including payments to employees of hospitals, skilled nursing and assisted living facilities, as well as spouses of those individuals, according to Acting U.S. Attorney Phillip Talbert.

Some of those who received the kickbacks have also been charged in the case, including John Eby, a registered nurse who worked for a hospital in Sacramento; Anita Vijay, the director of social services at a skilled nursing and assisted living facility in Sacramento; Jai Vijay, Anita Vijay’s husband; and Mariela Panganiban, the director of social services at a skilled nursing facility in Roseville.

Anti-kickback violations are more likely to result in criminal charges than the civil penalties that often result from False Claims Act complaints, legal experts recently told Hospice News.

Advertisement

California for more than a year has been cracking down on hospice fraud.

Poor, uncoordinated hospice oversight by government agencies in California has contributed to widespread fraud and other violations, according to a report from the state’s Department of Justice (CDOJ).

The report follows an audit of California’s agencies that oversee hospice providers, including the licensure process. The state’s legislature last October approved two bills requiring this audit and instituting a moratorium on new provider licenses.

The state sharpened its gaze on the hospice space in the wake of two 2019 OIG reports showing that about 20% of hospices surveyed by regulators or accreditors between 2012 and 2016 had a condition-level deficiency that posed a serious patient safety risk.

California and Texas were the states that saw the most serious deficiencies, according to OIG.

CDOJ recommended that the four oversight agencies convene a task force to identify, investigate, and prosecute fraud and abuse by hospice agencies in that county, as well as annually meet to conduct a risk assessment of the Medi-Cal hospice program statewide.

The state agency also indicated that it would provide more detailed guidance to the state’s Department of Public Health when it refers fraud complaints for litigation or prosecution.

“The state’s weak controls have created the opportunity for large-scale fraud and abuse,” CDOJ indicated in its report. “We identified numerous indicators of such fraud and abuse by hospice agencies, which typically offer palliative end-of-life care to individuals with medical diagnoses of fewer than six months to live.”

Editor’s Note: At the time of publication this article contained an error, reporting “18 years” rather than “18 months.”

Companies featured in this article:

, ,