A Pennsylvania physician has agreed to pay the federal government $850,000 to resolve allegations that she submitted fraudulent travel claims to Medicare, the Department of Justice announced Nov. 9.
The settlement resolves allegations that Nava Nawaz, MD, used her laboratory company, Perll Diagnostics, to defraud Medicare by submitting more than 23,000 false and inflated travel reimbursement claims for specimen collections and testing between 2014 and 2017. Prosecutors allege that Dr. Nawaz misrepresented the distances traveled by the lab's technicians and wrongly obtained taxpayer dollars for travel that didn't occur.
In addition to the monetary settlement, Dr. Nawaz also agreed not to own or operate a lab for the next 18 months.