Dulce Briceño, a resident of Miami-Dade County, Fla., was sentenced today to 63 months in prison for her role in a $2.3 million Medicare fraud scheme, according to a U.S. Department of Justice news release.
Ms. Briceño was also ordered to pay $1.8 million in restitution, according to the release. She was originally charged by indictment in the Eastern District of Michigan, but after her arrest in Miami, she consented to have her case transferred to the Southern District of Florida for her plea and sentencing.
Ms. Briceño pleaded guilty on Oct. 9, 2009, and she admitted that around Sept. 2006, she agreed with the owners of X-Press Center to manage the clinic on a day-to-day basis in exchange for a percentage of the profits the clinic generated. Ms. Briceño also admitted that during the time the clinic was open, the clinic routinely billed the Medicare program for services that were medically unnecessary or were never provided and that she and her co-conspirators at the clinic had purchased only a small fraction of the medications that the clinic billed the Medicare program for providing, according to the release.
According to the guilty pleas, Medicare beneficiaries were not referred to X-Press Center by their primary care physicians or for any other legitimate medical purpose, but rather were recruited to come to the clinic through the payment of kickbacks. In exchange for those kickbacks, Ms. Briceño admitted that the Medicare beneficiaries would visit the clinic and sign documents indicating that they had received the services billed to Medicare. Kickbacks paid to Medicare beneficiaries at the clinic, according to plea documents, came in the form of cash and prescriptions for narcotic drugs.
Ms. Briceño also admitted that between Sept. 2006 and March 2007, she and her co-conspirators at X-Press Center caused the submission of around $2.3 million in false and fraudulent claims to the Medicare program for services purportedly provided at X-Press Center. Medicare paid around $1.8 million on those claims, according to the release.
Read the DOJ's release on Dulce Briceño.