Medicare Fraud Scheme Costs Detroit Therapy Company Owner 30 Months in Prison

Detroit resident Victor Jayasundera, co-owner of occupational and physical therapy provider Jos Campau Physical Therapy, has been sentenced to 30 months in prison and three years supervised release for his role in a scheme to defraud Medicare of over $1.9 million, according to the Justice Department. Mr. Jayasundera must also pay restitution totaling $855,484, jointly and severally with his co-defendants.

Jos Campau Physical Therapy was not entitled to bill Medicare for its services because the company did not have a Medicare provider number. Instead, Mr. Jayasundera and the co-owner of Jos Campau, Fatima Hassan, conspired to create fictitious patient files that could be used by other providers to submit false claims to
Medicare. They engaged in or directed others to engage in the following wrongful conduct.

• Paying kickbacks to patient recruiters for information on Medicare beneficiaries necessary to file Medicare claims.
• Creating phony physical and occupational therapy files, including patient evaluation forms and patient notes.
• Having Medicare beneficiaries pre-sign forms and visit sheets so they could be fraudulently used to bill for services that were not provided.

Once the phony patient files had been created, Mr. Jayasundera and Ms. Hassan sold these files to therapy companies that obtained Medicare provider numbers. Those companies then billed Medicare for services to the patients whose files had been falsified by Jos Campau and paid kickbacks to Jos Campau Physical Therapy based on their Medicare billings.

Over a two-year period from 2005 to 2007, the patient files fabricated by Jos Campau Physical Therapy supported the submission of about $1.9 million in false claims to Medicare for occupational and physical therapy services that were not provided.

Waters & Kraus is a national firm with highly skilled lawyers practicing qui tam litigation in four offices, including Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Baltimore. Our attorneys have decades of experience successfully representing whistleblowers in a variety of fraud cases. Contact us or call our attorneys at 800.226.9880 to learn more about our practice and how we can assist.