Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson is suing the Chicago-based Center for COVID Control, accusing the company of knowingly providing invalid COVID-19 test results to patients, NPR affiliate KUOW reported Jan. 31.
The company, which operated 11 testing sites in Washington state, allegedly instructed employees to "lie to patients on a daily basis" about delayed test results, according to Mr. Ferguson's office. The FBI raided the company's headquarters on Jan. 22 over similar charges.
The Washington state lawsuit accuses the company of operating without proper licenses, improperly collecting patients' insurance information, and causing "imminent and irrevocable harm" to the state's residents by failing to provide valid test results and possibly contributing to the spread of COVID-19, the KUOW report said.
The lawsuit also alleges that the company's operations director instructed employees to inaccurately post-date samples ahead of testing, in order to appear more recent than they were, despite the operations director having been told that after three days, samples were useless for testing.
The Center for COVID Control allegedly sent a patient negative test results, despite employees telling the patient a minute prior that her test results had been lost, the report said. That woman later tested positive at a health department-operated site.