Maple Grove Woman Charged In Alleged $20 Million Conspiracies

MAPLE GROVE, MN — Minnesota Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman announced that additional federal charges have been filed in connection with alleged health care fraud conspiracies totaling more than $20 million. Following the indictments of 12 defendants in December 2016, a federal grand jury has added four defendants, including a Maple Grove woman.

Federal authorities also added additional mail fraud and wire fraud charges in connection with alleged parallel conspiracies that investigators say executed schemes to fraudulently bill insurance companies for millions of dollars.

Mimi Doan, 34, of Maple Grove has been charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud.

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A total of 26 individuals, including seven chiropractors, currently face federal charges, with three additional individuals facing state charges, according to a news release.

The case, which is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, is the result of an investigation conducted by the Minnesota Commerce Fraud Bureau and the FBI.

According to the charging documents, at various times between at least 2010 and 2016, chiropractors Preston Forthun, Angela Schulz, Huy Ngoc Nguyen, Adam Burke and other Doctors of Chiropractic, engaged in schemes with others to defraud automobile insurance companies. Authorities say the schemes involved the submission of fraudulent no-fault insurance claims.

The chiropractors involved in the scheme would submit claims and receive reimbursements for chiropractic services that either were not medically necessary or were never rendered, but were instead designed to fraudulently maximize reimbursement from the patients’ automobile insurance companies, investigators say.

According to the charging documents, in order to get more patients to come to chiropractic appointments for treatment they did not need, the chiropractors would make illegal payments to “runners,” who typically made upwards of $1,000 per automobile accident patient, in exchange for bringing the patient into the chiropractor’s office.

Runners were often not paid, or paid only in part, until after the patient had attended a minimum threshold number of treatment sessions, according to authorities. In order to keep the patients coming back for medically unnecessary appointments, the runners often paid illegal kickbacks to the patients, investigators said.

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