An Ellington psychiatrist and mental health clinic have agreed to pay over $800,000 to settle False Claims Act allegations.

The government alleges that Dr. Erum Shahab and Ellington Behavioral Health (EBH) submitted claims to Medicare for multiple units of urine drug screening tests when they knew or should have known that only one unit of service could be billed per patient encounter. By coding their claims using multiple units instead of a single unit, Shahab and EBH received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Medicare program that they were not entitled to receive.

In addition, the government alleges that Shahab and EBH submitted claims to the Medicaid program for urine drug screening tests when the urine samples were either never actually tested at all or were tested weeks or months after the samples were collected from the Medicaid beneficiaries.

To resolve the governments’ allegations under the federal and state False Claims Acts, Shahab and EBH have agreed to pay $805,071.

The whistleblower, Dr. David Simon, a former employee at EBH, will receive a share of the proceeds of the settlement in the amount of $99,113.