Recently, a Pennsylvania doctor and his wife were indicted and pled guilty for participating in schemes to solicit and receive kickbacks and bribes in exchange for ordering genetic tests. Yitzchok “Barry” Kurtzer and his wife, Robin Kurtzer, pled guilty to an indictment that charged them with conspiracy to violate the Federal Anti-Kickback Statute. Two of Barry Kurtzer’s employees also pled guilty for their roles in the kickback scheme as did Dr. Lee Besen for his role in a related cash-for-genetic tests scheme.
Barry Kurtzer was a primary care physician with offices in the Scranton, Pennsylvania area and Robin Kurtzer helped to manage those offices. Starting in or about October 2018 through about July 2020, the Kurtzers solicited and received monthly kickbacks and bribes in exchange for collecting Medicare beneficiaries’ DNA samples and sending those samples for genetic tests to clinical laboratories in Pennsylvania and New York. The Kurtzers brought their employees into the scheme who helped to collect the DNA swabs in exchange for payments to them.
Barry Kurtzer was introduced to an unnamed Individual (Individual 1) through another doctor who accepted kickbacks and bribes from Individual 1 in exchange for sending genetic test swabs to a certain laboratory. Soon after meeting Individual 1, Barry and Robin Kurtzer agreed that Barry Kurtzer would steer genetic test swabs for his Medicare patients to the certain laboratory, in exchange for kickbacks and bribes of roughly $2,000 per month from Individual 1.
Barry Kurtzer and Individual 1 performed their agreed-upon roles for a time before discussing kickback and bribe payments Individual 1 was paying another doctor for a similar scheme and Barry Kurtzer asking how his volume compared to the other doctor. In or around September 2019, the Kurtzers negotiated with Individual 1 to increase their monthly kickback and bribe payments to roughly $3,000 per month for steering approximately 30 genetic test swabs to the certain laboratory every month. The Kurtzers also added swabs for allergy tests to their kickback scheme.
The cash kickbacks paid to Kurtzer’s office went up to $5,000, and the Kurtzers typically accepted the cash in one of Barry’s offices, sometimes behind locked doors. Once the COVID-19 pandemic started, they stopped meeting in-person and started accepting cash kickbacks by wire and through a money transfer app on cell phones. The two implicated employees also accepted kickback and bribe payments using the cell phone app.
Around February 2020, Barry Kurtzer and two implicated employees agreed to start sending the genetic test swabs to a different laboratory because that new laboratory collected higher Medicare reimbursements per genetic tests.
Medicare was billed more than $1.3 million for tests generated from Barry Kurtzer’s practice as a result of these schemes.
“The defendants admitted that they and others worked together to solicit and accept kickbacks in exchange for referring expensive tests to particular labs. Bribes and kickbacks have no place in a doctor’s office. Patients need to be sure that their doctor is acting in their interest, uncorrupted by the promise of lucrative bribes and kickbacks. This office is always ready to work with our law enforcement partners to ensure that those who violate the Anti-Kickback Statute are held accountable,” said U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger.