A federal judge in Fort Smith sentenced a Lavaca man to 15 years in prison today in a health care fraud and money laundering case related to some $134 million in bogus Medicare claims for covid-19 lab tests, drug tests and other purported lab work.
Billy Joe Taylor, 44, was also ordered to pay almost $30 million in restitution related to the fraudulent claims. He was arrested in May 2021 and pleaded guilty to commit health care fraud and money laundering last October.
Federal prosecutors across the country have been pursuing hundreds of fraud cases related to the pandemic, from schemes targeting unemployment assistance or emergency business loans to various types of health care fraud. Taylor’s criminal activity began in 2017, according to his plea agreement, but he and others capitalized on the covid-19 crisis to ramp up their fraudulent billing practices.
“Taylor and his co-conspirators obtained medical information and private personal information for Medicare beneficiaries, and then misused that confidential information to repeatedly submit claims to Medicare for diagnostic tests,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Arkansas said in a press release. “According to court documents, Taylor and his co-conspirators received more than $38 million from Medicare on those fraudulent claims.”Covcov
