ALLEGANY NURSE SENTENCED TO JAIL TIME, PROBATION
AND ORDERED TO REPAY OVER $126,000 TO STATE

J. Joseph Curran, Jr., announced today that a Mount Savage registered nurse was sentenced to three years incarceration with all but one year suspended, for billing the Medicaid Program for over $126,000 worth of private duty nursing services that she did not perform. Allegany County Circuit court Judge Gary G. Leasure ordered Regina Waites, 44, of Calla Hill Road N.W., to serve two months of the sentence in the Allegany County detention center, and the remainder on home detention.

Waites pleaded guilty to one count of Medicaid health plan fraud on March 25, 2002, admitting to causing her employer to unwittingly submit numerous false time sheets and nursing notes to the Medicaid program. Waites worked for Tri-State Home Health and Equipment, Inc., a nursing agency that contracted with the Maryland Medicaid program to provide in-home nursing services to eligible children requiring skilled care. Waites was supposed to provide nursing care for up to 12 hours per day to a child who suffered from an illness that, among other symptoms, caused her to stop breathing suddenly and without warning. Over a multi-year period, Waites filled out time sheets as if she worked each day for the full shift. She also completed nursing notes that contained observations concerning the child’s health for those hours. She then submitted those documents to Tri-State, which billed Medicaid for the services that Waites had purportedly provided.

An investigation by the Office of the Attorney General revealed that Waites was employed at a hospital, a nursing home and at Western Correctional Institution during many hours she represented that she was providing care to the child. An examination of the time sheets from her various jobs uncovered hundreds of hours of overlap between the hours billed for those jobs and the hours she billed to Tri-State. Evidence developed by the State proved that during those periods of overlap, Waites was working at the other jobs, and not for Tri-State as she claimed. Additionally, a review of her time sheets indicated that she was routinely claiming to work continuously for stretches of 48 to 116 hours in a row without a break. During one seven day period in March of 2000, Waites submitted time sheets to her various employers representing that she worked 144 out of a possible 168 hours.

Judge Leasure ordered Waites to serve five years probation at the completion of her one year sentence, during which time she must make payments toward restitution of $126,706 to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
This case was prosecuted by the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office.

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