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A Michigan woman is the first in the nation to be charged criminally with misappropriating money from the Provider Relief Fund (PRF), the Department of Justice (DOJ) said Feb. 11.
[1] Amina Abbas of Taylor previously owned 1 on 1 Home Health, which she shuttered in early 2020 after Medicare hit her with a $1.620 million overpayment demand because the home health agency had billed Medicare for patients who didn’t qualify for home health care, DOJ alleged. “According to the indictment, 1 on 1, which was never operational during the pandemic, received approximately $37,656.95 designated for the medical treatment and care of COVID-19 patients,” and Abbas gave the money to her family members for personal use, DOJ alleged. She was charged with embezzlement of government property in the Eastern District of Michigan. In an unrelated case, a California ambulatory surgery center recently entered into a civil monetary penalty settlement
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A former post-doctoral fellow at the McGovern Medical School, part of the University of Texas (UT) Health Science Center, admitted to committing research misconduct by “knowingly and intentionally falsifying, fabricating, and plagiarizing data and text” in six papers and eight manuscripts, according to the HHS Office of Research Integrity (ORI). In its Feb. 4
Federal Register notice, ORI said Yibin Lin “falsely created fictitious author names and affiliations without listing himself as an author to disguise himself from being the offender, and submitted them for publication in
bioRxiv and
medRxiv, open access preprint repositories, by falsely assembling random paragraphs of text, tables, and figures from previous publications and manuscripts to improve his citation metrics.”
A principal investigator (PI) who was initially accused of one instance of plagiarism noted that he had similarly copied text into two other National Science Foundation (NSF) proposals as a way of explaining how he did citations in applications versus in publications. But, as the NSF Office of Inspector General described it, “the PI’s response to our inquiry did not dispel the allegation,” and OIG ultimately determined he had “knowingly committed plagiarism” in three proposals by inserting text from three sources.
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But the PI’s university had itself found that he was “not culpable” for four instances of plagiarism because he “did not realize he needed to be as thorough with citations in a proposal as he did in a publication” reasoning OIG called “inconsistent and contrary to NSF guidance.”
Compliance Today (February 2021) - The U.S. Department of Justice announced the addition of 11 new members to the Procurement Collusion Strike Force (PCSF), created to co.
The United States Department of Health & Human Services Office of Inspector General released its semiannual report to Congress for the time period spanning from April 1, 2020, to September 30, 2020.
[1] The report contains numerous investigations into fraud, opioid use, children’s welfare, and various enforcement actions against white-collar crime.
According to the report, the government may be able to reclaim several billions in stolen or ill-gotten funds from the unethical people who used the pandemic to try to cheat others and profit. Of the more than $4 billion in expected recoveries, the report shows that more than $942 million could be returned based on program audit findings and $3.14 billion in expected investigative recoveries.