A Toronto Star/Global News investigation reveals that few pharmacists are ever caught for fraudulent overbilling, despite evidence that it’s a persistent problem, and that chances of a criminal conviction are slight in the rare cases that are pursued.
“I’m the cleaner,” says the man wearing a ball cap and sunglasses to mask his identity.
“I help them to clean up the books … fix the papers,” he says. “Make it look nice, like a proper pharmacy.”
We’ll call the cleaner “Ivan.” He agreed to share details of the murky world of pharmacy fraud — a scam that costs the public millions of dollars every year, but no one knows exactly how much.
Ivan is the man pharmacists call when they have been flagged for overbilling the Ontario Drug Benefit Program (ODB), sometimes for hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. He comes in and creates a paper trail to hide the fraud and get pharmacists off.
Read more at Niagara Falls Review