Telemarketing Company Owner Sentenced for Role in Medicare Scheme

HOMEWOOD, IL - The owner of a Homewood senior living facility and telemarketing company will spend one year in prison for her role in a scheme that involved referring nursing home patients to agencies in exchange for kickbacks.

Sundae Williams, 47 received the sentence last week, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office Northern District of Illinois. She was convicted of one count of conspiracy to solicit and receive remuneration in return for referring Medicare patients and six counts of soliciting and receiving remuneration in return for referring Medicare patients at Serenity Living last year.

Williams was the head of Serenity Marketing, Inc. which did business as the Homewood facility, the federal complaint stated. She was accused of making unsolicited phone calls to recruit patients for the agencies and then received payments for every patient she recruited.

Her alleged actions “helped fuel a system in which skilled nursing agencies and doctors defrauded Medicare by billing for unnecessary services that Medicare beneficiaries did not need or qualify for,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Chahn Lee said. The offense is “serious,” Lee added, “because it led to the kinds of waste and fraud that the Anti-Kickback Statute was designed to prevent.”

It was argued at trial that Serenity employees were trained to cold-call Medicare beneficiaries and convince them to accept home health services.

“If a Medicare beneficiary expressed interest, Serenity employees obtained the beneficiary’s personal information, including their Medicare number and provided it to certain home health agencies that had agreed to pay Serenity for such referrals.”

Previous convictions in the larger scheme included those of James Ademiju, Dr. Alan Newman and Diana Jocelyn Gumila.

Williams was ordered by U.S. District Judge John J. Tharp Jr. to spend 12 months and one day in prison and pay just under $600,000. The amount represents “the proceeds of her crimes,” according to the complaint.