Follow-Up: Flushing Adult Day Care Director Pleads Guilty in $127M Medicare and Medicaid Fraud Scheme
Daniel Lee, 57, of Flushing, in Queens, New York, pleaded guilty on Monday in federal court to defrauding Medicare and New York State Medicaid of approximately $127 million. The Justice Department said Lee pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He is scheduled to be sentenced on March 2, 2027, and faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison, with the sentence to be determined by a federal district court judge after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
GSM previously reported that New York's social adult day care sector faced a joint state and federal enforcement sweep in October, covering centers in Flushing and Brooklyn, followed by a compliance warning letter from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to New York State. This guilty plea puts the methods of one such operation into court documents.
According to court documents, Lee was a program director at two Flushing social adult day care centers, Happy Life Inc. and Z&W Empire Enterprise, Inc., doing business as Royal Adult Day Care Center. Over approximately ten years, the two centers paid illegal cash kickbacks and bribes to Medicaid recipients to induce them to enroll, and billed Medicaid for services that were never provided. Some claims were submitted for periods when the recipients were hospitalized and could not possibly have received the services.
During the same period, Lee and his co-conspirators paid kickbacks and bribes to Medicare beneficiaries and Medicaid recipients at a related pharmacy that submitted claims for medically unnecessary prescription drugs. When law enforcement executed a search warrant at Happy Life, they recovered over $100,000 in cash, and seized approximately $900,000 in fraud proceeds held in bank accounts.
Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the Justice Department's National Fraud Enforcement Division said that for over a decade, Lee helped run a kickback scheme that stole from Medicare and Medicaid through fraudulent claims. U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. for the Eastern District of New York said the plea marks the end of Lee's long-running fraud. The case is being investigated by HHS-OIG, the FBI, IRS Criminal Investigation, and OSC. (Source: U.S. Department of Justice)
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：美国卫生与公众服务部总部大楼（联邦固定图库）。 / Photo: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services headquarters building (federal asset library).
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