Federal Anti Kickback Statutes Apply to all Healthcare Payments

by | Jan 20, 2025 | Federal Crimes, Professional Misconduct |

Physicians that have children in healthcare positions can not take advantage of their circumstances to create a false billing scheme or ask for kick backs. This is health care fraud. These scheme are easily discovery as health care kickback schemes. The patrician physician can not make referrals to family pharmacist for expensive drugs that are not medically necessary and expect a financial kick back. This gets the physician put in jail. Recently, Dr. Tajul Shams Chowdhury, a licensed physician, owned and operated a medical practice in Edinburg called Center for Pain Management. His son, Mohammad Imtiaz Chowdhury, worked as a purported marketer for a local pharmacy. According to court documents, Dr. Chodhury wrote prescriptions for costly compound drugs were referred from Dr. Chowdhury’s clinic in exchange for kickback payments made from the pharmacy to Mohammad Chowdhury. In total, Mohammad Chowdhury was paid $6.6 million in kickbacks as part of the scheme. The father physician was found out and charge with fraud. He has plead guilty.

Father/Son Kickback Scheme Results in Guilty Pleas

In a separate case, John Ageudo Rodriguez, a licensed pharmacist, owned and operated a pharmacy in Pharr called Pharr Family Pharmacy. Rodriguez admitted he paid kickbacks in excess of $24 million to various marketers. The marketers had relationships with physicians and clinics and could cause prescriptions for expensive compound drugs to be referred to Rodriguez’s pharmacy.
During the time of the conspiracy, from 2014 to 2016, Rodriguez’s pharmacy billed more than $110 million to various federal health care benefit programs for compound drugs. Rodriguez’s guilty plea follows guilty pleas of numerous other marketers involved in the prescription drug kickback scheme.

Guilty Pleas for Kickbacks

Paying or receiving kickbacks to any party in exchange for health care services is fraud. Call me to discuss your case.