In a hefty financial blow to its operations, NUWAY Alliance, Inc., an addiction treatment provider, has consented to fork over $18.5 million to Uncle Sam for engaging in some shady Medicaid billing practices. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Minnesota, these guys took advantage of a system meant to help folks with addiction by offering kickbacks to Medicaid patients and billing for services they never even delivered. Joseph H. Thompson, the acting U.S. Attorney, didn't mince words when he put it like this: "The submission of false claims for federally funded government contracts will not be tolerated."
Between January 2019 and February 2025, in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, NUWAY Alliance was caught red-handed, doling out inducements to Medicaid patients to attend their intensive outpatient treatment programs and then submitting duplicate claims for the same periods of treatment — a classic no-no under federal law. Despite only resulting in allegations, they have been accused of defrauding millions from the federal and state coffers, and now they have to pay up big time.
The hammering down on NUWAY also shackles them to a five-year-long Corporate Integrity Agreement, or CIA, with the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG). Acting tough on compliance, the agreement requires NUWAY to keep their billing straight and hire an outside outfit to make sure they don't step out of line again. HHS-OIG's main man on the case, Mario M. Pinto, underscored the importance of this, stating, "Our enforcement agency is dedicated to protecting the integrity of federal health care programs including Medicaid."
Getting the ball rolling on the sting operation were the teamwork of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Minnesota's Civil Division, the big guns from the HHS Office of the Inspector General, and legal eagles from both the Minnesota Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Division and the Office of the Inspector General at the Minnesota Department of Human Services.
