Counselor from Arkansas pleads guilty to stealing Medicaid money, promises to pay $425,000

Joseph Randolph
Joseph Randolph

A Bentonville man paid by Arkansas Medicaid to provide mental health counseling to young people with psychiatric problems pleaded guilty Wednesday to stealing money from the program over an 11-month span and promised to pay $425,000 in restitution.

Joseph Brannon Randolph, 42, pleaded guilty to felony charges of theft by deception and failure to keep the required Medicaid-billing records in exchange for a $2,500 fine and five years on probation.

Prosecutors dropped the 21 Medicaid fraud charges against Randolph in exchange for his guilty plea.

Randolph is a licensed professional counselor, but that license was suspended by regulators around the time he was arrested in November 2015, Arkansas Board of Examiners in Counseling Executive Director Michael Loos said Wednesday.

Loos said he'll recommend revocation of Randolph's license based on his felony convictions when the board meets next month.

Randolph will have to pay $29,943 in restitution, at a minimum of $200 per month, to fulfill the conditions of his probation.

The remaining $399,877 in restitution will be collected through a civil judgment that Randolph has accepted in Benton County. All of the money will go to the state's Medicaid trust fund.

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Randolph's attorney, Pat Benca, told Pulaski County Circuit Judge Barry Sims that the attorney general's office, which prosecutes Medicaid fraud, has promised not to garnish Randolph's wages to collect the judgment so Randolph can pay the money back.

Assistant Attorney General Emily Abbott, who prosecuted the case on behalf of Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, told the judge that Randolph did not keep the required medical records and stole the money by overbilling Medicaid over an 11-month period, Nov. 14, 2014, through Oct. 15, 2015.

Court filings show that the case against Randolph involved 16 Medicaid beneficiaries and, for two of those clients, dated back to July 2012.

"People attempting to defraud Arkansas taxpayers will be held accountable," Rutledge said in a news release. "Investigators and attorneys from the attorney general's office work each day to go after those who defraud the system in which so many depend. Medicaid is critical for some of the most vulnerable, and it is important for individuals like Joseph Randolph to be prosecuted for their crimes."

According to the arrest affidavit, Joshua Biviano, an investigator for the attorney general's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, started scrutinizing Randolph's billing practices on Sept. 15, 2015, due to Randolph's "total billing amounts and the highly inconsistent volatile patterns observed in his Medicaid bill history."

Between July 2012 and October 2015, Randolph billed Medicaid for $584,683, the affidavit states. Randolph worked under Medicaid's mental-health practitioner program, which provides mental health services to people 21 and younger with recognized psychiatric problems.

He was the second-highest Medicaid billing counselor in the program, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit states an example of one client for whom Randolph billed Medicaid $12,953 for counseling services over a 10 ½-month span. At that rate, at one hour of counseling per week, Randolph overcharged Medicaid by 242 hours, worth about $10,512, Biviano reported.

Records from the Arkansas Court of Appeals show that Randolph reported to the Department of Workforce Services that he earned a net income of $41,000 for 2013, which is $2,800 per month. In September 2014, he reported that he was netting $5,428 per month, which was $1,113 to $2,143 short of meeting his family's monthly expenses, including medical costs.

He disclosed his finances to the agency after it determined in July 2014 that he had to repay the $8,569 in unemployment benefits he collected between March 2011 and July 2011 after his firing as a rape crisis counselor at the Northwest Arkansas Rape Crisis Center.

The center prevailed when it challenged the decision to pay him unemployment, court filings show. Randolph appealed the order to repay the money to the Court of Appeals, which sided with Workforce Services in April 2015.

Metro on 05/25/2017

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