The owner of a Fountain Valley medical center who’d originally denied Medicare fraud charges when he was indicted by a federal grand jury in March 2011 is scheduled to finally confess his crimes today to a judge.
Tuan Duc Tran used Fountain Valley Healthcare Center across the street from Mile Square Park to conduct at least a five-year con game to dupe the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with fake reimbursement requests.
How lucrative was the crime?
According to federal records, Tran tricked HHS into sending him unearned checks totaling more than $777,000.
This month, Tran acknowledged the strength of Assistant United State Attorney Lawrence E. Kole’s case against him in a 17-page guilty plea (mail fraud) in exchange for the government dismissing eight other charges.
The defendant, who is free on bail and was born in 1960, faces a maximum punishment of 20 years in prison and a fine double the size of the stolen funds, according to the plea deal.
Inside Orange County’s Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse, U.S. District Court Judge Josephine Staton Tucker will sentence Tran at a scheduled Nov. 8 hearing.
A key element in the process of qualifying for Medicare reimbursement is that the patient be recommended for services by a real doctor and the medical woe not imaginary.
Tran violated both rules and concocted fake documents in an effort to mask his crimes.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime ReportingĀ for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise fromĀ New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.