Ex-Optum Employee Guilty In Fraud Scheme, Took Massive Kickbacks: Authorities

MINNEAPOLIS — A former high-ranking employee at UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Optum Inc. was found guilty Tuesday of several counts of fraud after he hired an unqualified friend for a job in which the friend did no work and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks, authorities said.

Karan Gupta, 47, was found guilty of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering conspiracy and 10 counts of wire fraud following a six-day federal jury trial in Minneapolis, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Mr. Gupta abused his position of trust as the Senior Director of a subsidiary of the largest healthcare provider in the United States to defraud his company by hiring a ghost employee for a fictitious position, so that he could collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks over many years,” Rick Evanchec, acting special agent in charge of the FBI’s Minneapolis Field Office, said in a department news release.

Gupta, a California resident, was a senior director of data analytics at Eden Prairie-based Optum, where he earned an annual salary of more than $260,000 at the height of his career, according to the department.

In 2015, Gupta recruited and approved the hiring of a lifelong friend to work at Optum in a managerial data engineering position for which the friend was unqualified, authorities said, giving the friend a false resume, which the friend used to secure the position, and becoming his friend’s supervisor.

“Then, for almost four years, the friend did no work at all for Optum, all while collecting a salary that began above $100,000 and increased with raises and bonuses each year,” the news release said. “The friend met no one else at Optum, sent almost no emails, and regularly did not log into his Optum computer for weeks on end.”

At Gupta’s demand, the friend paid Gupta more than half of his unearned Optum salary in kickbacks, according to the department.

The friend, who lived in New Jersey, would withdraw the kickback payments from his bank account in cash, then deposit the cash in a New Jersey branch of Gupta’s bank, authorities said. Later, the friend opened a new checking account, designated the account to receive Optum direct deposits, and sent Gupta the account's debit card, which Gupta used to withdraw the fraud proceeds, according to the department.

The scheme was discovered after Gupta was terminated in November 2019 for a separate fraud, authorities said, adding that Gupta’s frauds against Optum totaled more than $1.2 million.