Reuters June 29, 2022
May 31, 2022 – As the world slowly emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic in fits and spurts, healthcare fraud enforcement remains a top priority for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and other government agencies with enforcement authority. Specific areas have assumed particularly high priority as COVID-19 changed much about the healthcare landscape — in some ways temporarily and in other ways more permanently.
The most obvious post-pandemic enforcement priority concerns the pandemic itself, which saw a variety of government-sponsored relief programs and funding distributed to healthcare providers. Even at the pandemic’s peak, DOJ officials made it clear that the use of such relief would be scrutinized — and that has proven to be true.