People wait in line to enter CityMD, a health clinic on the Upper West Side that offers coronavirus disease (COVID-19) testing, as the Omicron coronavirus variant continues to spread in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., on December 19, 2021.
Andrew Kelly | Reuters
walgreensCityMD will pay $12.04 million to resolve COVID-19 fraud charges brought by the Justice Department, the department announced Friday.
It is alleged that from February 2020 to April 2022, the urgent care provider received fraudulent government Covid testing reimbursements by submitting false claims to a Covid program designated specifically for uninsured patients, even though their patients had Health insurance.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey brought the charges under the False Claims Act, which incentivizes whistleblowers to file lawsuits related to potential fraud by offering them a portion of the government’s reward in a successful case.
CityMD patient Stephen Kitzinger initially alleged the fraud in 2020.
CityMD, which operates more than 100 walk-in urgent care clinics in New York and New Jersey, is cooperating with the government’s investigation and has hired a third-party firm to help the government determine losses from the alleged fraud.
U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger said in a statement Friday that “uninsured Americans at risk from COVID-19 are covered by emergency funding programs that provide them with “We cannot and will not tolerate the alleged misuse of these funds. “
Walgreens did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours.
