Florida Chiro Clinic Charged With Fraud

Three employees of Fort Myers Chiropractic Center in Florida were charged with insurance fraud last week for submitting bills to insurance companies for treatment never received.

According to ABC-7, Luiz Hernandez, 22, Caroline Sterling, 43, and Yariselys Hernandez, 24, have been accused of scamming $3,253 by submitting bogus bills to Direct General Insurance claiming to have treated someone who was in jail.

“[William] Perez-Leon was arrested on a DUI charge on July 13th and stayed in jail until August 25th.”

“But during that time, the insurance company told deputies that claim forms, supplemented by daily physical therapy notes signed by three employees of the chiropractic office, continued to come in.”

Although the company may claim that the paper work was simply a billing error, all the daily physical therapy notes were handwritten, dated and signed for a period where Perez-Leon could not have possibly treated there. After the State Division of Insurance Fraud spoke to Perez-Leon, he told them that office employees asked him to pre-sign several blank forms.

Stania Bernard, a therapist who formerly treated Perez-Leon, also told agents she had witnessed patients signing multiple blank forms during their initial intake paperwork and left the clinic in June 2010 after being pressured to sign paperwork for patients she never treated.

All three of the charged employees allegedly claim to have done nothing wrong and deny having patients pre-sign forms.  When confronted by authorities, Luis Hernandez supposedly suggested to authorities that someone posing as Perez-Leon must have come in for treatment because anyone’s forms he signed were treated on that day. As always, these charges are allegations at this point and all parties are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.