DME supplier screening flawed
This article was originally published in The Gray Sheet
Executive Summary
A Government Accountability Office report released Aug. 4 attempts to show how easy it is for phony durable medical equipment suppliers to defraud the government. The report illustrates how GAO investigators set up two fictitious equipment firms and were approved for Medicare billing privileges in Virginia despite having no clients and no inventory. The investigation comes amid growing scrutiny of Medicare spending on DME, including findings by a Senate committee in July that suppliers were using inactive identification numbers, including those for dead doctors, to bill Medicare