New York State attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman has announced the arrests of Nasreen Khan, the owner of Foster Nurse Agency, and her son Rehan Khan, an employee, for stealing over $300,000 from the Medicaid program.
Medicaid regulations require nurses to work no more than 16 hours in any 24-hour period. This is to ensure that appropriate and safe care is being provided to those recipients. Over a six-year period, the Khans, through their agency, routinely scheduled nurses to work more than 16 hours. In many cases, the nurses worked from 24 to 48 hours straight without any relief.
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In order to conceal this from Medicaid, the Khans falsified claim forms to indicate that their nurses did not work more than 16 hours. They did this by substituting the names and license numbers of other nurses in order to lead Medicaid to believe that there were multiple nurses working shifts that were longer than 16 hours. The Khans fraudulently billed more than 13,000 hours to Medicaid this way, fleecing taxpayers of over $300,000.
“By violating the rules, these individuals betrayed the public trust and put people at risk,” says Schneiderman. “These defendants have not only defrauded the Medicaid system out of hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars, but they also allowed nurses to provide substandard care to their patients; our office will hold them accountable for these crimes.”
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Both Khans are charged with felony grand larceny in the second degree, and multiple counts of offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree, also felonies. They each face a maximum of five to fifteen years in state prison. Their agency will be excluded from participating in the Medicaid program.
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