Home Health & Hospice Week

Operation Wheeler Dealer, the federal government's aggressive crackdown on power wheelchair fraud, rolled over its latest victims last month - and hard.

Florida U.S. Attorney Marcos Jimnez announced Chadd Miller was sentenced to 87 months in prison and ordered to pay $1.7 million in restitution to Medicare. Todd W. Neff was sentenced to 53 months' imprisonment and likewise was ordered to pay $1.7 million in restitution to Medicare. Neff also was ordered to serve three years of supervised release after his imprisonment.

Miller and Neff were indicted along with five co-defendants last February for recruiting and paying kickbacks to Medicare beneficiaries. The beneficiaries, in turn, agreed to serve as "fictitious" power wheelchair recipients.

Through their Miami-area companies, Imagine Consulting and K&F Services, Miller and Neff allegedly submitted $5 million in claims to Medicare for expensive chairs and accessories that were never actually supplied, or only temporarily supplied through "staged deliveries" to the patients, Jimnez said.

Neff fled to Costa Rica after his indictment, but returned voluntarily. He was sentenced to a concurrent 53-month sentence for violating pre-trial bond conditions.

Miller and Neff were the last of the defendants in the investigation to be sentenced. The five other participants' jail terms ranged from one year to 78 months, and their restitution figures varied from $400,000 to $1.7 million, Jimnez said in a release.