OWNER OF COUNSELING SERVICES COMPANY RECEIVES THREE YEAR JAIL SENTENCE FOR MEDICAID FRAUD

Attorney General J. Joseph Curran, Jr., announced today that Stanley Junious Benn, 42, of Arrowood Court in Rosedale, was sentenced to three years in prison for defrauding the Medicaid program of almost some quarter-million dollars. Benn, a licensed clinical professional counselor, was taken into the custody of the Division of Corrections immediately upon imposition of the sentence.

Baltimore County Circuit Court judge Susan Souder imposed the sentence, and additionally ordered Benn to pay $249,406 in restitution for his actions while operating Resolutions Unlimited, Inc., which provided a type of counseling service to eligible Medicaid recipients from 2002 until 2004.

From May 2002 through November 18, 2003, when a search and seizure warrant was executed on the company’s offices, Benn billed for more than 5000 counseling services, for which Medicaid paid him more than $340,000. However, an investigation by the Office of the Attorney General revealed that more than 3,600 of those billings were for services that Benn knew had not been provided by his counselors. In one example noted by the State, Benn billed Medicaid for 166 counseling sessions despite being aware that the client had been seen only three times; in another, Benn billed for more than 50 counseling sessions before the client had been seen even once.

"I am pleased that the judge agreed that we cannot tolerate such blatant theft by unscrupulous people, especially when the theft is from a program that works to better the lives of impoverished children,” said Attorney General Curran. In a victim impact statement to the court, Susan Steinberg, a representative of the Medicaid program, told Judge Souder that fraud committed against Medicaid by people like Benn reduces the ability of the State to provide needed care to the most vulnerable citizens of the State.

The case was prosecuted by the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit (MFCU) of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office. The MFCU conducted the investigation with assistance from the Mental Hygiene Administration (MHA), which suspended payments to Resolutions Unlimited in March of 2004. MHA has been working with the MFCU to root out fraud in its programs, and several cases of possible fraudulent behavior by MHA providers are currently under investigation by the Attorney General’s Office.

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