A Fake Psychologist Treated Troubled Children, Prosecutors Say

Fake Credentials on LinkedIn Page

Michal Gold
The New York Times
Originally published September 29, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

But Mr. Payne has no formal counseling training that prosecutors were aware of. He told investigators that he was a doctor with a “home-schooled, unconventional education during the Black Panther era,” according to court papers.

None of Mr. Payne’s patients had been hospitalized or physically harmed, an official said. Some of his patients liked him and his treatment methods.

But others became suspicious during therapy sessions. Mr. Payne would often talk about his own life and not ask patients about theirs, the official said. He would also repeat exercises and worksheets in some of his sessions with little explanation, giving patients the sense that he had run out of ideas to treat them.

According to prosecutors, Mr. Payne and Ms. Tobierre-Desir worked at three locations: his main office in a large building in Brooklyn Heights, a smaller building in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens and the offices of a nonprofit based at Kings County Hospital Center, one of the hospitals with which Mr. Payne claimed to be affiliated.

Mr. Payne’s relationship with the nonprofit, the Kings Against Violence Initiative, was unclear. The group did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

The info is here.

Birmingham psychologist defrauded state Medicaid of more than $1.5 million, authorities say

Carol Robinson

Sharon Waltz

al.com
Originally published August 15, 2019

A Birmingham psychologist has been charged with defrauding the Alabama Medicaid Agency of more than $1 million by filing false claims for counseling services that were not provided.

Sharon D. Waltz, 50, has agreed to plead guilty to the charge and pay restitution in the amount of $1.5 million, according to a joint announcement Thursday by Northern District of Alabama U.S. Attorney Jay Town, Department of Health and Human Services -Office of Inspector General Special Agent Derrick L. Jackson and Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall.

“The greed of this defendant deprived mental health care to many at-risk young people in Alabama, with the focus on profit rather than the efficacy of care,” Town said. “The costs are not just monetary but have social and health impacts on the entire Northern District. This prosecution, and this investigation, demonstrates what is possible when federal and state law enforcement agencies work together.”

The info is here.

Personal infidelity and professional conduct in 4 settings

John M. Griffin, Samuel Kruger, and Gonzalo Maturana
PNAS first published July 30, 2019
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1905329116

Abstract

We study the connection between personal and professional behavior by introducing usage of a marital infidelity website as a measure of personal conduct. Police officers and financial advisors who use the infidelity website are significantly more likely to engage in professional misconduct. Results are similar for US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) defendants accused of white-collar crimes, and companies with chief executive officers (CEOs) or chief financial officers (CFOs) who use the website are more than twice as likely to engage in corporate misconduct. The relation is not explained by a wide range of regional, firm, executive, and cultural variables. These findings suggest that personal and workplace behavior are closely related.

Significance

The relative importance of personal traits compared with context for predicting behavior is a long-standing issue in psychology. This debate plays out in a practical way every time an employer, voter, or other decision maker has to infer expected professional conduct based on observed personal behavior. Despite its theoretical and practical importance, there is little academic consensus on this question. We fill this void with evidence connecting personal infidelity to professional behavior in 4 different settings.

The Conclusion:

More broadly, our findings suggest that personal and professional lives are connected and cut against the common view that ethics are predominantly situational. This supports the classical view that virtues such as honesty and integrity influence a person’s thoughts and actions across diverse contexts and has potentially important implications for corporate recruiting and codes of conduct. A possible implication of our findings is that the recent focus on eliminating sexual misconduct in the workplace may have the auxiliary effect of reducing fraudulent workplace activity.

Duke agrees to pay $112.5 million to settle allegation it fraudulently obtained federal research funding

Seth Thomas Gulledge
Triangle Business Journal
Originally posted March 25, 2019

Duke University has agreed to pay $112.5 million to settle a suit with the federal government over allegations the university submitted false research reports to receive federal research dollars.

This week, the university reached a settlement over allegations brought forward by whistleblower Joseph Thomas – a former Duke employee – who alleged that during his time working as a lab research analyst in the pulmonary, asthma and critical care division of Duke University Health Systems, the clinical research coordinator, Erin Potts-Kant, manipulated and falsified studies to receive grant funding.

The case also contends that the university and its office of research support, upon discovering the fraud, knowingly concealed it from the government.

According to court documents, Duke was accused of submitting claims to the National Institute of Health (NIH) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) between 2006-2018 that contained "false or fabricated data" cause the two agencies to pay out grant funds they "otherwise would not have." Those fraudulent submissions, the case claims, netted the university nearly $200 million in federal research funding.

“Taxpayers expect and deserve that federal grant dollars will be used efficiently and honestly. Individuals and institutions that receive research funding from the federal government must be scrupulous in conducting research for the common good and rigorous in rooting out fraud,” said Matthew Martin, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina in a statement announcing the settlement. “May this serve as a lesson that the use of false or fabricated data in grant applications or reports is completely unacceptable.”

The info is here.

The Fake Sex Doctor Who Conned the Media Into Publicizing His Bizarre Research on Suicide, Butt-Fisting, and Bestiality

Jennings Brown
www.gizmodo.com
Originally published March 1, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Despite Sendler’s claims that he is a doctor, and despite the stethoscope in his headshot, he is not a licensed doctor of medicine in the U.S. Two employees of the Harvard Medical School registrar confirmed to me that Sendler was never enrolled and never received a MD from the medical school. A Harvard spokesperson told me Sendler never received a PhD or any degree from Harvard University.

“I got into Harvard Medical School for MD, PhD, and Masters degree combined,” Sendler told me. I asked if he was able to get a PhD in sexual behavior from Harvard Medical School (Harvard Medical School does not provide any sexual health focuses) and he said “Yes. Yes,” without hesitation, then doubled-down: “I assume that there’s still some kind of sense of wonder on campus [about me]. Because I can see it when I go and visit [Harvard], that people are like, ‘Wow you had the balls, because no one else did that,’” presumably referring to his academic path.

Sendler told me one of his mentors when he was at Harvard Medical School was Yi Zhang, a professor of genetics at the school. Sendler said Zhang didn’t believe in him when he was studying at Harvard. But, Sendler said, he met with Zhang in Boston just a month prior to our interview. And Zhang was now impressed by Sendler’s accomplishments.

Sendler said Zhang told him in January, “Congrats. You did what you felt was right... Turns out, wow, you have way more power in research now than I do. And I’m just very proud of you, because I have people that I really put a lot of effort, after you left, into making them the best and they didn’t turn out that well.”

The info is here.

This is a fairly bizarre story and worth the long read.

We need to talk about systematic fraud

Jennifer Byrne
Nature 566, 9 (2019)
doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-00439-9

Here is an excerpt:

Some might argue that my efforts are inconsequential, and that the publication of potentially fraudulent papers in low-impact journals doesn’t matter. In my view, we can’t afford to accept this argument. Such papers claim to uncover mechanisms behind a swathe of cancers and rare diseases. They could derail efforts to identify easily measurable biomarkers for use in predicting disease outcomes or whether a drug will work. Anyone trying to build on any aspect of this sort of work would be wasting time, specimens and grant money. Yet, when I have raised the issue, I have had comments such as “ah yes, you’re working on that fraud business”, almost as a way of closing down discussion. Occasionally, people’s reactions suggest that ferreting out problems in the literature is a frivolous activity, done for personal amusement, or that it is vindictive, pursued to bring down papers and their authors.

Why is there such enthusiasm for talking about faulty research practices, yet such reluctance to discuss deliberate deception? An analysis of the Diederik Stapel fraud case that rocked the psychology community in 2011 has given me some ideas (W. Stroebe et al. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 7, 670–688; 2012). Fraud departs from community norms, so scientists do not want to think about it, let alone talk about it. It is even more uncomfortable to think about organized fraud that is so frequently associated with one country. This becomes a vicious cycle: because fraud is not discussed, people don’t learn about it, so they don’t consider it, or they think it’s so rare that it’s unlikely to affect them, and so papers are less likely to come under scrutiny. Thinking and talking about systematic fraud is essential to solving this problem. Raising awareness and the risk of detection may well prompt new ways to identify papers produced by systematic fraud.

Last year, China announced sweeping plans to curb research misconduct. That’s a great first step. Next should be a review of publication quotas and cash rewards, and the closure of ‘paper factories’.

The info is here.

Once-prominent 'conversion therapist' will now 'pursue life as a gay man'

Julie Compton
NBC News
Originally posted January 23, 2019

David Matheson, a once prominent Mormon “conversion therapist” who claims to have helped some gay men remain in heterosexual marriages, is looking for a boyfriend.

The revelation broke Sunday night after the LGBTQ nonprofit Truth Wins Out obtained a private Facebook post made by “conversion therapy” advocate Rich Wyler, which stated that Matheson “says that living a single, celibate life ‘just isn’t feasible for him,’ so he’s seeking a male partner.”

Matheson then confirmed Wyler’s assertions on Tuesday with a Facebook post of his own. “A year ago I realized I had to make substantial changes in my life. I realized I couldn’t stay in my marriage any longer. And I realized that it was time for me to affirm myself as gay,” he wrote.

Matheson, who was married to a woman for 34 years and is now divorced, also confirmed in an interview with NBC News that he is now dating men.

The info is here.

Cheyenne Psychologist And His Wife Sentenced To 37 Months In Prison For Health Care Fraud

Department of Justice
U.S. Attorney’s Office
District of Wyoming
Press Release of December 4, 2018

John Robert Sink, Jr., 68, and Diane Marie Sink, 63, of Cheyenne, Wyoming, were sentenced on December 3, 2018, to serve 37 months in prison for making false statements as part of a scheme to fraudulently bill Wyoming Medicaid for mental health services, which were never provided, announced United States Attorney Mark A. Klaassen. The Sinks, who are married, were also ordered to pay over $6.2 million in restitution to the Wyoming Department of Health and the United States Department of Health and Human Services, and to forfeit over $750,000 in assets traceable to the fraud, including cash, retirement accounts, vehicles, and a residence.

The Sinks were indicted in March 2018 by a federal grand jury for health care fraud, making false statements, and money laundering. At all times relevant to the indictment, John and Diane Sink operated a psychological practice in Cheyenne. John Sink, who was a licensed Ph.D. psychologist, directed mental health services. Diane Sink submitted bills to Wyoming Medicaid and managed the business and its employees. The Sinks provided services to developmentally disabled Medicaid beneficiaries and billed Medicaid for those services.

Between February 2012 and December 2016, the Sinks submitted bills to Wyoming Medicaid for $6.2 million in alleged group therapy. These bills were false and fraudulent because the services provided did not qualify as group therapy as defined by Wyoming Medicaid. The Sinks also falsely billed Medicaid for beneficiaries who were not participating in any activities, and therefore did not receive any of the claimed mental health services. When Wyoming Medicaid audited the Sinks in May 2016, the Sinks did not have necessary documentation to support their billing, so they ordered an employee to create backdated treatment plans. The Sinks then submitted these phony treatment plans to Wyoming Medicaid to justify the Sinks’ false group therapy bills, and to cover up their fraudulent billing scheme.

The pressor is here.

Air Force Psychologist Found Guilty of Sexual Assault Under Guise of Exposure Therapy

Caitlin Foster
Business Insider
Originally published Dec. 10, 2018

A psychologist at Travis Air Force Base in California was found guilty on Friday of sexually assaulting military-officer patients who were seeking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, The Daily Republic reported.

Heath Sommer may face up to 11 years and eight months in prison after receiving a guilty verdict on six felony counts of sexual assault, according to the Republic.

Sommer used a treatment known as "exposure therapy" to lure his patients, who were military officers with previous sexual-assault experiences, into performing sexual activity, the Republic reported.

According to charges brought by Brian Roberts, the deputy district attorney who prosecuted the case, Sommer assaulted his patients through "fraudulent representation that the sexual penetration served a professional purpose when it served no professional purpose," the Republic reported.

The info is here.

Psychologist felt 'honest, sincere' before $800K healthcare fraud exposed

John Agar
MLive.com
Originally posted November 21, 2017

A psychologist who defrauded insurance companies of $800,000 spent half of the money on vacations, concert tickets and a mobile-recording business, the government said.

George E. Compton Jr., 63, of Sturgis, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Gordon Quist to 28 months in prison.

Compton, who pleaded guilty to healthcare fraud, said he was "ashamed" of his actions.

"Until this investigation, I did not hesitate to describe myself as an honest, sincere man," he wrote in a letter to the judge. "Seeing myself from a different perspective has been trying to say the least. ... The worst punishment for my admitted crimes will be the exclusion from the very work I love."

The government said he billed insurance companies for counseling sessions he did not provide, from Jan. 1, 2013, until June 30, 2016.

The article is here.

Google Sets Limits on Addiction Treatment Ads, Citing Safety

Michael Corkery
The New York Times
Originally published September 14, 2017

As drug addiction soars in the United States, a booming business of rehab centers has sprung up to treat the problem. And when drug addicts and their families search for help, they often turn to Google.

But prosecutors and health advocates have warned that many online searches are leading addicts to click on ads for rehab centers that are unfit to help them or, in some cases, endangering their lives.

This week, Google acknowledged the problem — and started restricting ads that come up when someone searches for addiction treatment on its site. “We found a number of misleading experiences among rehabilitation treatment centers that led to our decision,” Google spokeswoman Elisa Greene said in a statement on Thursday.

Google has taken similar steps to restrict advertisements only a few times before. Last year it limited ads for payday lenders, and in the past it created a verification system for locksmiths to prevent fraud.

In this case, the restrictions will limit a popular marketing tool in the $35 billion addiction treatment business, affecting thousands of small-time operators.

The article is here.

How Much Do A Company's Ethics Matter In The Modern Professional Climate?

Larry Alton
Forbes
Originally posted September 12, 2017

More than ever, a company’s success depends on the talent it’s able to attract, but attracting the best talent is about more than just offering the best salary—or even the best benefits. Companies may have a lucrative offer for a prospective candidate, and a culture where they’ll feel at home, but how do corporate ethics stack up against those of its competition?

This may not seem like the most important question to ask when you’re trying to hire someone for a position—especially one that might not be directly affected by the actions of your corporation as a whole—but the modern workplace is changing, as are American professionals’ values, and if you want to keep up, you need to know just how significant those ethical values are.

What Qualifies as “Ethics”?

What do I mean by “ethics”? This is a broad category, and subjective in nature, but generally, I’m referring to these areas:

• Fraud and manipulation. This should be obvious, but ethical companies don’t engage in shady or manipulative financial practices, such as fraud, bribery, or insider trading. The problem here is that individual actions are often associated with the company as a whole, so any individual within your company who behaves in an unethical way could compromise the reputation of your company. Setting strict no-tolerance policies and taking proper disciplinary action can mitigate these effects.

The article is here.

Drug company faked cancer patients to sell drug

Aaron M. Kessler
CNN.com
Originally published September 6, 2017

When Insys Therapeutics got approval to sell an ultra-powerful opioid for cancer patients with acute pain in 2012, it soon discovered a problem: finding enough cancer patients to use the drug.

To boost sales, the company allegedly took patients who didn't have cancer and made it look like they did.

The drug maker used a combination of tactics, such as falsifying medical records, misleading insurance companies and providing kickbacks to doctors in league with the company, according to a federal indictment and ongoing congressional investigation by Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri.

The new report by McCaskill's office released Wednesday includes allegations about just how far the company went to push prescriptions of its sprayable form of fentanyl, Subsys.

Because of the high cost associated with Subsys, most insurers wouldn't pay for it unless it was approved in advance. That process, likely familiar to anyone who's taken an expensive medication, is called "prior-authorization."

The article is here.

Tom Price Flies Blind on Ethics

Editors
Bloomberg View
Originally published September 21, 2017

Under the lax ethical standards President Donald Trump brought to the White House, rampant conflicts of interest are treated with casual indifference. This disregard has sent a message to his entire administration that blurring lines -- between public and private, right and wrong -- will be not just tolerated but defended. At least one cabinet member appears to have taken the message to heart.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price took five chartered flights last week, including one to a conference at a resort in Maine. Two of the flights -- round-trip from Washington to Philadelphia -- probably cost about $25,000, or roughly $24,750 more than the cost of an Amtrak ticket, for a trip that would have taken roughly the same amount of time. Total costs for the five flights are estimated to be at least $60,000.

The department has yet to reveal how many times Price has flown by charter since being sworn into office. There would be no problem were he picking up the tab himself, as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos reportedly does. But cabinet secretaries -- other than for the Defense and State departments, who often ride in military planes -- typically fly commercial. Taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for charters except in emergency situations.

The article is here.

US Researchers Found Guilty of Misconduct Collectively Awarded $101 Million

Joshua A. Krisch
The Scientist
February 27, 2017

Researchers found guilty of scientific misconduct by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) went on to collectively receive $101 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), according to a study published this month (February 1) in the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics. The authors also found that 47.2 percent of the researchers found guilty of misconduct they examined continue to publish studies.

The article is here.

The research is here.

The Elements of Guile - Harper's Magazine

The Harper's information is here.

Why does imprisoned psychologist still have license to practice?

Charles Keeshan and Susan Sarkauskas
Chicago Daily Herald
Originally published November 11, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Federal prosecutors said Rinaldi submitted phony bills to Medicare for about $1.1 million over four years, collecting at least $447,155. In nearly a dozen instances, they said, she submitted claims indicating she had provided between 35 and 42 hours of therapy in a single day. In others, she submitted claims stating she had provided care to Chicago-area patients when she was actually in San Diego or Las Vegas.

The article is here.

Stop ignoring misconduct

Donald S. Kornfeld & Sandra L. Titus
Nature
Originally posted 31 August 2016

The history of science shows that irreproducibility is not a product of our times. Some 350 years ago, the chemist Robert Boyle penned essays on “the unsuccessfulness of experiments”. He warned readers to be sceptical of reported work. “You will meet with several Observations and Experiments, which ... may upon further tryal disappoint your expectation.” He attributed the problem to a 'lack of skill in the scientist and the lack of purity of the ingredients', and what would today be referred to as inadequate statistical power.

By 1830, polymath Charles Babbage was writing in more cynical terms. In Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, he complains of “several species of impositions that have been practised in science”, namely “hoaxing, forging, trimming and cooking”.

In other words, irreproducibility is the product of two factors: faulty research practices and fraud.

The article is here.

Disgraced Chapel Hill Ethicist Says Claims Against Her Are Totally False

by Andy Thomason
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published August 2, 2016

Jan Boxill, the ethicist and former faculty chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose apparent participation in the shocking academic fraud there left observers amazed, says all the allegations against her are false.

In a letter responding to the National Collegiate Athletic Association on Tuesday, Ms. Boxill’s lawyer, Randall M. Roden, said the claims made against her in a report by a former federal prosecutor, Kenneth L. Wainstein, were untrue.

“It did not happen,” the defiant letter reads. “Not one of the allegations against Jan Boxill is true,” Mr. Roden continued, referencing allegations made by the NCAA, which relied on the so-called Wainstein report.

The article is here.

Research fraud: the temptation to lie – and the challenges of regulation

Ian Freckelton
The Conversation
Originally published July 5, 2016

Most scientists and medical researchers behave ethically. However, in recent years, the number of high-profile scandals in which researchers have been exposed as having falsified their data raises the issue of how we should deal with research fraud.

There is little scholarship on this subject that crosses disciplines and engages with the broader phenomenon of unethical behaviour within the domain of research.

This is partly because disciplines tend to operate in their silos and because universities, in which researchers are often employed, tend to minimise adverse publicity.

When scandals erupt, embarrassment in a particular field is experienced for a short while – and researchers may leave their university. But few articles are published in scholarly journals about how the research fraud was perpetrated; how it went unnoticed for a significant period of time; and how prevalent the issue is.

The article is here.