Today’s issue of WorkCompRecap features the announcement from the California Department of Industrial Relations’ Division of Workers’ Compensation (DIR/DWC) and DIR’s Anti-Fraud Unit that they have suspended 178 medical providers during the first eight months of 2022.
The DIR noted that providers are suspended from the workers’ compensation system when they have been convicted of fraud-related crimes, have been suspended from the Medicare or Medicaid programs due to fraud or abuse, or have lost their professional license, and since 2017, a total of 649 providers have been suspended. DWC has also initiated new lien consolidation cases estimated at $75 million for those providers that were convicted of a fraud-related crime in 2022, and a total of 63,000 liens have been dismissed since 2017 with a value of nearly $775 million.