A mother-daughter pair of Jacksonville entrepreneurs don’t deserve prison time for being part of a kickback deal that collected nearly $4 million from Medicare for Covid tests that no one ordered, a judge has decided.
Sentencing guidelines recommended up to 46 months behind bars for Latania Smith-Washington, 50, and Courtney Lewis, 31, but U.S. District Judge Wendy Berger on Monday sentenced the two to prison during which the women helped investigators build cases against four others tied people. to Medicare fraud.
“The amount of loss and the severity of the crime is not lost on them,” the women’s attorney, Mitch Stone, told the judge. He said after the sentencing that his clients “do not have a criminal mind” but had been in contact with a man who sold them on a scheme they later learned was illegal.
The women operated SWL Services LLC, a medical testing company they described as “known for its COVID testing,” though the company has suffered from small business problems including ineffective marketing, according to an August 2022 story in the online magazine VoyageJacksonville .
In 2022 and 2023, Medicare paid for at-home COVID-19 test kits, which were shipped free to people covered by the government program if they requested the tests.
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Despite the marketing issues, the company billed Medicare for 64,673 shipments of at-home Covid test kits to people enrolled in the expanded federal insurance program over five months in 2023, according to settlement agreements the women signed in March.
The change came because Medicare decided in 2022 to pay companies like SWL to send people enrolled in the program up to eight tests for free, but said people had to ask for the tests. The offer ended in May 2023.
This building on Spring Glen Road in Jacksonville was listed in state records as the office of SWL Services LLC, a defunct firm whose leaders entered guilty pleas to fraud related to Medicare reimbursement for at-home COVID-19 testing.
Instead of collecting requests and sending out tests, the plea agreements stated that SWL made deals with companies that would send them data on people who supposedly wanted the tests, including beneficiary ID numbers that SWL needed to file bills with Medicare to submit.
Stone said his customers questioned whether people on the lists had actually requested the tests and that the companies sent recordings of some phone calls in which some people actually requested tests, but those recordings reflected only a small portion of the entire series of orders.
SWL paid the companies a flat fee for each beneficiary ID, but only if Medicare paid a SWL bill, which prosecutors said made the payment a kickback for data used in the federal program.
The scam ended when federal agents served a search warrant at SWL’s office on Spring Park Road and Smith-Washington and Lewis immediately told investigators what they had done and how.
Close-up photo of the box for self-test for COVID-19 (rapid antigen test).
The women still had most of the money Medicare sent, handing over $2.9 million from the government and their own savings, Stone said. Berger noted that the women lived “very modestly” compared to other people she had convicted of Covid fraud, and said restitution for the remainder would be paid back slowly on a schedule they could afford.
Two people the women worked with, Kevin Karl Wills Jr. of Fort Lauderdale and Noel Gary Beres of Miami-Dade County, have already pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges related to the kickback scheme and are awaiting sentencing. Two others will also be charged, according to a memo to Berger from Assistant U.S. Attorney Arnold Corsmeier.
Prosecutors also asked the judge to recognize the women’s “substantial assistance” but asked for sentences of 24 to 30 months for a crime whose maximum penalty is five years in prison.
Despite the Medicare offer expiring last year, the federal government said in October that anyone could again request up to four tests per household for free, whether they are on Medicare or not. An announcement of the offer told people to provide a name and shipping address to receive the tests, but not to offer any further information to “avoid the scammers.”
This article originally appeared in the Florida Times-Union: $4M COVID Medicare scam gets Jacksonville women time
