If employees are an organization’s greatest asset, then recruitment carries a significant weight for the potential success of a company. Recruitment is the process of actively seeking out, finding, and hiring candidates for a specific position or job. For Karel Felipe and Tamara Quicutis, the owners of three home healthcare companies, they went far and wide to find the right people. In Cuba, where many are eager for the chance to work in the United States, the land of opportunity. So eager, they could be willing to participate in Felipe and Quicutis’s multi-million dollar Medicare scheme.
Felipe and Quicutis recruited the individuals from Cuba to sign Medicare enrollment documents to appear as the owners of the home healthcare companies to conceal the identities of Felipe, Quicutis and others involved in the scheme. They defraud Medicare by billing over $93 million for home health therapy services that were never rendered. These fraudulent claims included claims for services that were purportedly provided to Medicare beneficiaries after they had died. After submitting the false claims, Felipe and Quicutis used hundreds of shell companies and bank accounts in Florida and other states to launder the Medicare fraud proceeds and convert the proceeds into cash at Miami-area ATMs and check-cashing stores.
Despite their best efforts to cover their tracks, Felip and Quicutis were found guilty and sentenced to over eight years in prison. As the case against Felipe and Quicutis ended, the implications of their actions resonated not only through the Cuban immigrant community but the healthcare industry too. Their operation not only siphoned millions from a system meant to aid the sick and elderly, but it also manipulated individuals seeking a better life, using their hope as a conduit for deceit.
Outstanding job by the F.B.I in this case.
Today’s Fraud of The Day is based on article “Cuban immigrants recruited in massive Medicare scam, feds say. 2 in Miami” published by the Miami Herald on January 6, 2023
Two Miami-Dade business owners are going to prison for more than eight years for running a massive $93 million Medicare fraud scheme that involved the recruitment of Cuban immigrants. The immigrants would serve as the purported owners of home healthcare companies to hide the pair’s role in the scheme that bilked the tax-payer funded program.
Karel Felipe, 42, of Miami Shores, and Tamara Quicutis, 54, of Hialeah, were found guilty at trial in October of conspiring with others to submit $93 million in false claims for unprovided medical services by using lists of Medicare patients’ stolen identities — even after some had died, according to federal prosecutors.
