Rick Scott's Dirty Hands

[finehoe]

A former accountant turned FBI whistleblower said Monday that he is convinced Gov. Rick Scott was well aware of widespread wrongdoing within his former hospital chain and was at one point a target of a federal criminal investigation.

John Schilling, 52, a registered Republican from Naples, said that within six months of being hired at Columbia/HCA, Inc., in 1993, he found the company was preparing two sets of auditing books — one for submission to the federal government to obtain Medicare reimbursement and the other for internal recordkeeping that was stamped "confidential."

Soon after, Schilling went to federal investigators and a probe was launched that resulted in Columbia/HCA paying $1.7 billion in fines for defrauding Medicare and Medicaid, then the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history.

Scott left the company in 1997, four months after federal officials went public with their investigation. The fines were levied in 2000 and 2002 and Scott has long maintained that he knew nothing of the illegal actions.

Schilling said that was impossible for a "hands-on" executive like Scott.

"The facts are, Rick Scott was the leader of a criminal enterprise and now he's running Florida," Schilling said at a Tallahassee news conference organized by Democrat Charlie Crist's campaign.

"It's not right and I don't believe Floridians will be fooled again," added Schilling, who had shared his knowledge of Scott and Columbia/HCA with a handful of television reporters in 2010, during the governor's first run for office.

http://postonpolitics.blog.palmbeachpost.com/2014/10/06/former-scott-accountant-claims-governor-deeply-involved-in-hospital-wrongdoing/