The Associated Press State & Local Wire

January 14, 1999, Thursday, PM cycle

Psychiatrist suspended when Mississippi fraud plea comes to light

SECTION: State and Regional

LENGTH: 457 words

DATELINE: MOBILE, Ala.

A Baldwin County psychiatrist was suspended after her employer learned that earlier this week she had pleaded guilty in Mississippi to defrauding Medicaid of more than $ 220,000.
The director of the Baldwin County Mental Health Center in Fairhope suspended Dr. Cheryl Elizabeth Richardson on Wednesday after receiving a call from a local reporter seeking comment about her guilty plea in Jackson, Miss. on Monday.
Ms. Richardson had been employed by the center for nearly a year.
Center director Dr. Stephan Scott said he was confident Ms. Richardson had not been involved in Medicaid fraud while at the center, and said she has done a fine job treating children and their families.
The suspension is “my way of making sure she’s not seeing any more Medicaid patients until we get this figured out,” Scott said.
He said Ms. Richardson did not tell him of the fraud case when she was hired last March.
Officials at the Alabama Board of Medical Examiners and the state Medical Licensure Commission said they also were unaware of Ms. Richardson’s guilty plea and plan an investigation to determine if she should lose her Alabama license.
Under her plea, Ms. Richardson must pay a fine and restitution of more than $ 330,000 and could receive as much as five years in prison when sentenced March 22. She said that she suffered from a manic-depressive mental illness that impaired her judgment.
“What happened over there all came as a direct result of my illness,” said Ms. Richardson, 40. “I’m in treatment and I’m stabilized now. It has not happened again.”
The Mississippi Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Unit director, however, said three years of fraudulent billings could not be excused by mental problems.
“Even if she has a mental illness, it wasn’t such that she couldn’t tell right from wrong,” said assistant Mississippi Attorney General Kenneth O’Neal. “She still knew what she was doing.”
O’Neal owned the clinics in Mississippi and oversaw the billing. The violations came to light when an employee at the Richardson Institute clinics in Biloxi and Gulfport became suspicious of what he believed were false and greatly exaggerated bills, O’Neal said.
Investigators seized records from Ms. Richardson’s home and office in the fall of 1997 but did not arrest her or shut down the clinics, he said.
Ms. Richardson voluntarily closed her practice a few weeks later, and did not renew her Mississippi medical license. She responded to an advertisement with the Baldwin center a few months later, Scott said.
Ms. Richardson will be barred from seeing any Medicaid patients for five years after his office notifies the federal government and the Mississippi Board of Medical Examiners, which disciplines doctors.