WASILLA -- The owner of a Wasilla center for the disabled was sentenced Thursday to four months in jail and more than $1.6 million in restitution for criminal Medicaid fraud charges linked to altered medical records.
The hefty sentence comes as the Alaska Legislature grapples with Gov. Bill Walker's proposal to expand Medicaid in the state.
Laura Sasseen, 58, was sentenced as part of a plea deal approved Thursday afternoon in Anchorage District Court.
Sasseen owns Mat-Su Activity and Respite Center LLC, a now-shuttered facility known as "MARC" along the Palmer-Wasilla Highway. The center served 29 developmentally disabled clients with jobs, day activities and caregiver support.
It employed more than 100 people before it closed in June 2014 amid the state investigation.
In September, the state's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit charged Sasseen and the center with felony charges of falsifying business records and misdemeanor charges of medical assistance fraud.
Sasseen is scheduled to start her jail time in May. Her sentence was actually for 360 days, but with 240 suspended.
The agreement calls for Sasseen to pay more than $1.628 million in restitution to the state Medicaid program, according to assistant attorney general Andrew Peterson, who directs the state's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit. The figure represents a state estimate of MARC's improper billing to Medicaid for services without proper documentation to back it up.
The plea agreement also requires Sasseen pay a $5,000 fine and do 160 hours of community service. She'll be banned from billing Medicaid for 10 years, and the commissioner of health and social services could extend that period for another 10 years.
The restitution is "one of the larger" amounts a judge has ordered for Medicaid fraud, Peterson said, adding the sentence for the misdemeanor plea deal matched that of a felony conviction.
Records were primarily altered to show an increase in the services the agency claimed to have provided, the state says.
"Instead of taking responsibility, she chose to alter medical records to financially better herself," he said Thursday by phone. "She hurt a lot of people. The business shut down. All the recipients went to other locations. There were significant consequences based on her financial actions."
Sasseen's attorney, Richard Payne in Wasilla, couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
Interviewed briefly the day she closed the center last summer, Sasseen said the state owed her $300,000 in Medicaid payments and blamed her financial woes on the glitch-plagued Medicaid payment system.
The problems at the Mat-Su center came to light after the state notified Sasseen in 2012 that her business had been selected for a Medicaid audit. Peterson said the state audits about 75 providers a year.
Auditors noted modified documents; one former employee told investigators about "white-out changes" to case notes and timesheets.
The audit ultimately turned up $37,000 in alterations to selected medical records from 2009 and 2010, Peterson said. That amounted to $280,000 in overpayment when extrapolated to all the cases the center handled in that two-year period.
Sasseen also agreed to give up her right to administratively challenge the audit findings in the plea deal.
The case was investigated jointly by the Alaska Department of Law, Alaska State Troopers and the Department of Health and Social Services.