It's not the first time Walgreens has been sued for fraudulent Medicaid billing for prescription charges. In 1999, a $9.9 Million dollar settlement occurred in Minnesota for the same billing structure that Walgreens has just been in court for in 2010 right here in California.
A $1.1 million dollar punitive damage award was reinstated against Walgreens for firing pharmacist Sami Mitri, who reported the Medicare billing fraud practices occurring in 12 out of 30 stores investigated, according to court documents.
Mitri was a Walgreens Pharmacist for over 10 years. After making several complaints regarding the Medicare fraud to Walgreens managers, the Department of Health and Human Services and the California Department of Healthcare, he was fired in January, 2010, for "violating" a final written notice that was issued several months prior to his termination.
Mitri aggressively took action for his wrongful termination as a whistleblower, and in 2011, according to the court verdict, a jury awarded him $88,000 in economic damages and $1.1 million in punitive damages.
Pre-Reasoning for Termination
In 2008, 1 year prior to his initial complaint, Walgreens attempted to reduce expenses by limiting overtime hours for employees. In that time frame, according to court documents, the Walgreens district manager had “spoken to Mitri on several occasions” about keeping to his scheduled shifts.
May 2009, Mitri was issued a final written warning for working over his scheduled shifts because he was called into a mandatory staff teleconference, while on vacation. According to court documents, the final warning did not follow the discipline policy Walgreens has, which stated that employees are first issued a verbal warning, then a written warning, and next a final written warning, suspension or discharge..
Disciplinary action in awake of reporting fraud
Mitri found instances of Walgreens pharmacy employees billing Medicare for 30 days’ worth of patients prescriptions, but only providing 10 days’ worth of the prescription to patients, along with an IOU receipt for the remainder, essentially allowing the pharmacy to bill Medicare for the cost of a 30-day supply each time they only provided a 10-day supply in the summer of 2009. Walgreens managers yielded that they were aware of these grievances previous to issuing a final written warning, as showed by court reports.
Mitri continued to find IOU receipts for Medicare patients and raised his concerns a second time only months after his initial complaint. A loss prevention manager detained the IOU receipts Mitri found and told him that it was not his "job to report an example of fraudulent billing...to the government." Mitris attorney, Andrew Jones, stated to The Fresno Bee, that Mitri was standing "up for taxpayers."
Not even 7 days from the time of producing additional IOU labels, Walgreens managers conducted a single search of Mitri’s shift records and fired him on January 8, 2010, for violating the written warning by working 10 minutes before or after his scheduled shift. The 20 occasions found of Mitri’s working over his shift totaled 248 minutes, which totaled $450 of overtime pay.
