Over 80 doctors and licensing board administrators from Puerto Rico have been indicted by a US federal grand jury for taking part in a large scale fraud that helped unqualified doctors in the self governing US territory obtain medical licenses through alleged bribery and deception.
Most of the defendants are Puerto Rican and have been practising as doctors in Puerto Rico, including in emergency departments, but so far, according to the authorities, none has practised on mainland USA. A medical license from Puerto Rico is recognized in five US states: Arizona, Florida, New York, Texas, and Virginia.
The defendants are said to have obtained false licences by various means, including bribing officials with up to 10,000 dollars and substituting exam papers submitted by successful candidates for their own. According to ABC News, a secretary at the licensing board allegedly cut and paste extracts of papers from successful candidates into the papers submitted by some of the defendants so they could be passed off as authentic.
Some of the cases are thought to have involved “intermediaries”. These are people who approached doctors who failed their exams and suggested to them they could get licences by other means. The intermediaries liaised between the doctors and the licensing board officials.
Some of the defendants had failed their medical exams a dozen times. Most of them did their medical training overseas, for instance in the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Cuba.
One of the people arrested is the former executive director of the licensing board in Puerto Rico, Pablo Valentin. Television news showed him being led away by local police and agents from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The current list of charges could be the tip of the iceberg as federal agencies unravel the threads of a fraud that could stretch farther back than 2001, the year the current charges reaches back to. The pattern of the scores on the test papers suggests this could have been going on much earlier, said one attorney.
Also, there could be implications in other areas of the law. For instance, if the defendants have prescribed medication while unlicensed, then they could face charges under the Controlled Substances Act. And if they have submitted claims to Medicare or Medicaid while unlicensed, these actions may attract charges of false statements and mail fraud.
According to a report by the Associated Press in the New York Times, the defendants, if convicted, could face prison terms of 5 to 20 years.
The federal authorities are also searching for nine other suspects, believed to be in Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Florida and Philadelphia.
Click here for more information from Associated Press report (Mywire).
Written by: Catharine Paddock