Ex-health care employees accused of Medicaid fraud

Four ex-employees of four related home health care companies have been charged in federal court with conspiring to rip off the Pennsylvania Medicaid program for millions of dollars.

Travis Moriarty, 37, Tiffhany Covington, 41, Autumn Brown, 31, and Brenda Lowry Horton, 48, all of Pittsburgh, are charged in separate complaints, each with one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud.

The four were employees of Moriarty Consultants, based on Perrysville Avenue on the North Side, and three related companies: Activity Daily Living Services, Coordination Care and Everyday People Staffing.

The companies provided personal assistance, transportation, meal preparation and other services to Medicaid recipients in their homes.

The U.S. attorney’s office said Everyday People provided backoffice support for the other entities, and prosecutors said the

finances of the companies were commingled at the direction of the owners.

Between January 2011 and April 2017, the companies received more than $87 million in Medicaid payments based on claims for services, but prosecutors said the four employees and “numerous other individuals” engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy by submitting fraudulent claims for services that were never provided.

Employees fabricated time sheets for in-home service that they said they provided but never did, according to the complaints. In addition, certain employees, at the direction of the owner of Moriarty Consultants, stopped using their own names as attendants on time sheets and used ghost employees instead, according to the complaints.

Prosecutors said the ghost employees, including Ms. Brown, allowed their names to be used in exchange for a portion of the resulting salary payments from Medicaid. Other ghost employees never received kickbacks and had no knowledge of the fraud, prosecutors said.

The criminal complaints also allege that other workers employed by Moriarty submitted false time sheets for work done while they were actually working at other jobs or living outside of the region.

In addition, the complaints say that the co-conspirators paid kickbacks to consumers in exchange for the consumers’ agreement to participate in the false time sheet scheme.

The U.S. attorney’s office said that the companies also prepared false documents to submit to the state for audits to conceal the scope of the fraud.

Arlinda Moriarty of Cranberry, owner of Moriarty Consultants, denied Monday that she directed employees to commit fraud and said none of the employees works for her companies any longer, including Travis Moriarty, whom she described as her ex-brother-in-law.

Her company and others that she runs with her sister, Daynelle Dickens, had been the subject of a lawsuit brought last year by the federal government alleging they billed Medicaid for services that were never provided.

Ms. Moriarty acknowledged that the FBI came to her house last year and that she knew there was a criminal investigation, but she said she thought it had been resolved as part of the civil case.

“I have not been notified of this at all,” she said. “This is all going to be handled decently and in order.”

She said she did not supervise the four employees named and emphasized that she and her company have not been charged with any crimes.