MIAMI – Steven King was the chief compliance officer for a pharmacy holding company. His lack of compliance with the law will make him a federal inmate.
A federal jury convicted the 45-year-old Miramar man of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud in June for his role in a $50 million Medicare fraud scheme. It could have landed him a 20-year sentence.
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Instead, a judge decided Thursday to sentence him to four-and-a-half years behind bars Thursday, prosecutors said. King will also have to pay $21 million in restitution.
Prosecutors said King and a group of co-conspirators operated A1C Holdings LLC, which operated a number of pharmacies and “fraudulently billed Medicare for dispensing lidocaine and diabetic testing supplies that Medicare beneficiaries did not need or want.”
“As chief compliance officer, King was in a unique position to prevent and report the fraudulent scheme, but he used his position to defraud Medicare instead,” prosecutors said after his June conviction.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, King and his co-conspirators took several steps to conceal the massive fraud scheme.
Those included “enrolling their mail-order pharmacies as brick-and-mortar retail pharmacies to evade more rigorous oversight, shipping prescription refills for high-reimbursing medications and supplies without patient consent, concealing the ownership of A1C Holdings LLC and its pharmacies and transferring patients between these pharmacies without patient consent.”
Officials from the FBI and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services investigated the case.