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LOS ANGELES (CNS) - An ex-pharmacist from Sierra Madre pleaded guilty today to submitting fraudulent claims to Medicare for prescription drugs that were never dispensed to patients.
Paul Mansour, 55, entered his plea to one federal count of health care fraud. He faces up to 10 years behind bars at sentencing on June 28 in Los Angeles, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Mansour, who was a pharmacist at Best Buy Drugs in Sierra Madre, which he co-owned, created fake patient profiles and added fraudulent entries that duplicated prescriptions for medications provided to genuine patients of the store, according to the DOJ. He then submitted bogus claims for drugs added in the fictitious patient files that had never been dispensed, billing Medicare for the fake prescriptions in the names of actual patients.
Between January 2017 and last June, Mansour caused Medicare to pay the pharmacy between $600,000 and over $1 million as a result of the submission of the phony claims, the DOJ said.