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Arkansas CEO and Company Owner Sentenced and Ordered to Pay $8 Million
2/1/2024 3:00 PM EDT
Company owner Hunter Burroughs and chief executive officer Stephen Andrews, of an Arkansas-based medical supply and billing company, were both sentenced for their roles in leading a conspiracy to defraud the government and private workers’ compensation insurers by way of a billing and kickback fraud scheme. Burroughs and Andrews recruited physicians to dispense pain creams and patches to their workers’ compensation patients by offering them a split of the profits collected from successfully billing insurers. Additionally, Burroughs and Andrews conspired with Louisiana physicians Robert Bernauer and Robert Smith by shipping medications to the doctors, and billing insurers for prescriptions they wrote, despite knowing that neither physician had the required Louisiana license to dispense medications from their clinics. Burroughs was sentenced to four years’ incarceration, followed by three years of supervised release, and was ordered to pay approximately $3.5 million in restitution. Andrews was sentenced to two and a half years’ incarceration, followed by three years of supervised release, and ordered to pay approximately $2.3 million in restitution. The VA OIG, Defense Criminal Investigative Service, Department of Labor OIG, and US Postal Service OIG, with the assistance of the Louisiana Department of Justice, the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners, and the Louisiana Board of Pharmacy, investigated this case.
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