Acting United States Attorney for Minnesota Joe Thompson has just unveiled yet another fraud case — this one involving Asha Farhan Hassan and Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention (“EIDBI”) benefit. Hassan was charged by federal information with wire fraud for her role in a $14 million autism fraud scheme. The fraud is gross, massive, and enraging. In addition, Hassan had her hand in the Feeding Our Future till to the tune of $465,000.
The charge is the first in the ongoing investigation into fraud in the EIDBI autism program. Thompson is now talking about billions of dollars (emphasis added): “To be clear, this is not an isolated scheme. From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Each case we bring exposes another strand of this network.”
The Department of Justice press release details the EIDBI scheme. The scheme relied on recruits from Minnesota’s Somali community. Thompson does not hesitate to call out the role of the Somali community in the fraud:
To run their fraud scheme, Hassan and her partners needed children who had an autism diagnosis and an individual treatment plan. Hassan and her partners approached parents in the Somali community to recruit their children into Smart Therapy. Where a child did not have an autism diagnosis and an individual treatment plan, HASSAN and her partners worked with a QSP to get the recruited child qualified for autism services. There was no child that Smart Therapy was not able to get qualified for autism services.
As a recruitment tactic to drive up enrollment, Hassan and her partners paid monthly cash kickback payments to the parents of children who enrolled their children in Smart Therapy to receive autism services. These kickback payments ranged from approximately $300 to $1,500 per month, per child. The amount of these payments was contingent on the services DHS authorized a child to receive—the higher the authorization amount, the higher the kickback. Often, parents threatened to leave Smart Therapy and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks. Several larger families left Smart Therapy after being offered larger kickbacks by other autism centers. Hassan and her partners covered the cost of the kickback payments that Smart Therapy paid to parents through the fraudulent billings to Medicaid.
This is gross:
Hassan and her partners submitted millions of dollars’ worth of claims for Medicaid reimbursement on behalf of Smart Therapy. Many of these claims were fraudulently inflated, were billed without providers’ knowledge, and were for services that were not actually provided. Hassan submitted claims seeking reimbursement for the maximum number of hours permitted by Medicaid for a given treatment or service given to a particular client, when the client only received a fraction of those treatment hours, if any treatment was provided at all on that day. These claims were then repeated for numerous other providers. Hassan submitted claims for reimbursement to Medicaid that included fraudulent signatures or approvals from the required medical providers or supervising QSPs. In reality, the providers and QSPs either did not work for Smart Therapy, were out of the country on the day the services were provided or had not participated in or signed off on the services listed in the claims.
Most of the children were dropped off in the morning and picked up in the evening by drivers, who billed DHS for transportation services. It was a part of the fraud scheme that some of these transportation providers were also on the payroll of Smart Therapy.
Hassan consolidated her EIDBI scheme with the Feeding Our Future fraud. The synergy must have been immensely satisfying to Hassan:
While using Smart Therapy to defraud the EIDBI autism program, Hassan also used Smart Therapy to engage in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme to defraud the Federal Child Nutrition Program. Hassan enrolled Smart Therapy in the Federal Child Nutrition Program under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future in July 2020.
Shortly after enrolling in the program, Hassan began submitting fraudulent claims to Feeding Our Future. Hassan fraudulently claimed that Smart Therapy was serving breakfast and lunch to exactly 300 children a day, 7 days per week. Hassan prepared and submitted fraudulent meal counts, attendance rosters, and invoices in support of the fraudulent claims. Hassan submitted fraudulent invoices purporting to show that a food vendor company called S & S Catering provided meals to be served at the Smart Therapy site. By April 2021, Hassan claimed to be serving approximately 1,200 meals per day to children, 7 days per week, at Smart Therapy.
Between 2020 and 2021, Hassan claimed to have served nearly 200,000 meals to children at the Smart Therapy site, for which she claimed to be entitled to approximately $465,000 in Federal Child Nutrition Program funds.
Hassan sent hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraud proceeds abroad, some of which she used to purchase real estate in Kenya.
You may have heard of The Fire Next Time. James Baldwin borrowed the resonant lyrics of an old Negro spiritual for the title of his most popular book. The lyrics can be adapted to fit this case: God gave Asha the dollar sign. No more work, the fraud next time.
I have embedded the amended information charging Hassan below. I take it from the fact that the case is charged by information rather than indictment that Hassan intends to plead guilty.
