Schaumburg man charged in $66 million COVID test fraud
A federal grand jury has indicted a Schaumburg man in connection with a $66.2 million fraud scheme in which authorities say he billed for hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 tests that were never performed.
Rajesh “Raj” Patel, 52, is charged with five counts of wire fraud, federal prosecutors announced Tuesday. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison on each count, they said.
“This defendant allegedly exploited a global crisis for personal gain, fabricating hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 tests — then billing the taxpayer for it,” Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the justice department’s Fraud Division said in Tuesday’s announcement.
“Every dollar taken from a federal health care program is a dollar taken from the American people,” he added.
Patel’s attorney, Beau Brindley, said Tuesday his client is not guilty of any crimes.
“We will show he is guilty of no wrongdoing whatsoever and he has been unjustly and unfairly accused,” Brindley said.
According to court documents, Patel was the co-owner and chief operating officer of a Hillside laboratory that processed polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Around March 2021, prosecutors said, the laboratory entered into an agreement with Meridian Medical Staffing Inc. Under the agreement, the lab paid Meridian tens of millions of dollars for providing the laboratory with the specimens and biological information of the purported patients, authorities said.
In reality, many of those patients never existed or never provided test specimens to Meridian, authorities said. Between May 2021 and April 2022, prosecutors allege, Patel created fake “negative” results for at least 380,000 specimens that were never tested.
Prosecutors allege Patel’s lab then fraudulently billed the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration Uninsured Program for the tests. The lab submitted approximately $66.2 million in fraudulent claims to HRSA, and the agency paid the laboratory approximately $44.1 million as a result, federal authorities say.
Patel personally obtained approximately $28 million in proceeds from the scheme, according to prosecutors.
Court records show Patel is scheduled to be arraigned Oct. 29 in U.S. District Court in Chicago. He is not in custody while awaiting trial, Brindley said.
Chicago Tribune’s Jason Meisner contributed to this report.