Former Home Health Owner Receives 25 Months in Jail for Fraud and Kickback Schemes

Federal courts have been busy lately, especially when it comes to convicting owners and operators of home health care facilities for wage fixing, fraud, kickbacks, and other illegal schemes.

One of the most recent examples is Hakob Atoyan, the former co-owner of a home care agency and shelter in Sacramento. He pleaded guilty last week to one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and one count of conspiracy to pay and receive kickbacks for medical care, according to Acting U.S. Attorney Philip A. Talbert.

Atoyan has done this through ANGL Health Care, Excel Hospice and Excel Home Healthcare. He was sentenced to 25 months in prison and also ordered to pay more than $2.5 million in restitution to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

In particular, according to the US Department of Justice, Atoyan and his wife, Liana Karapetyan, filed thousands of false Medicare claims and orchestrated millions of dollars in kickbacks for referrals.

Karapetyan has already received 18 months in prison.

“In total, Atoyan, Karapetyan, and others forced the agencies to file more than 8,000 claims for the cost of home health care and hospice services with Medicare,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. “Based on these statements, Medicare paid the agencies approximately $31 million. Because the agencies received beneficiary referrals by paying kickbacks, the agencies should not have received any Medicare reimbursement.”

In addition to the two main actors, others involved in kickback schemes may also be potentially prosecuted. These are mostly skilled nurses and operators or nursing workers.

Angelo Spinola, chair of the Department of Home Care, Home Health Care and Hospice at the law firm Polsinelli, recently told Home Health Care News that government oversight has increased significantly in the home healthcare and hospice industry.

“It was very predictable for me,” he said. “I think [President] Biden and his advisers realized that many of the initiatives he wanted to implement would only be through his own appointees through the executive branch, so what we saw as soon as he took office was a real focus on creating those government emblems. You look, for example, at the Ministry of Justice. The Justice Department has added a ton of investigators.”

In 2021, the number of investigations into false claims was the highest since 2014, Spinola said.

“In 2021, settlements reported by the Justice Department raised $5.6 billion, and $5 billion of the $5.6 billion was health-related,” Spinola continued. “There is an increased focus not only on state enforcement, but also on state law enforcement, especially with respect to healthcare and home care in many of these areas.”

Hospice News editor Jim Parker contributed to this report.

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