Chester woman pleads guilty to Medicaid fraud, accused of running unlicensed group home and falsifying records
RICHMOND — A Chester woman pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to fraud-conspiracy charges stemming from a scheme to use her residence as an unlicensed group home.
Sharon Johnson, 58, faces the possibility of up to 20 years in prison when she is sentenced next April, according to the U.S. District Attorney's office in Richmond, which prosecuted the case.
Court records indicate Johnson pleaded guilty to charges of health care and wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit health-care fraud.
Johnson was the owner of a Chester-based company that provided facilitator and home-halth care aid for Medicaid-reimbursed services. Court records indicate that between 2014 and 2021, Johnson signed up several facilitator clients without their knowledge or consent to receive personal-care services and reportedly used her single-story, 1,326-square foot Parker Lane address in Chester as an unlicensed group home for up to a half-dozen of her clients, plus herself and an employee of her company.
Also during that same period, Johnson submitted falsified documents for 14 of her clients to receive personal-care services and pocketed the Medicaid reimbursement. Those documents included purported timesheets from her employees documenting their work on the services, when in fact, those employees had no knowledge the timesheets were submitted. Johnson is alleged to have created online portals in those clients' names and approved all of the requests submitted through them.
In a separate scheme, Johnson reportedly defrauded the Virginia Retirement System out of eight months of pension payments for one of her deceased clients by claiming medical power-of-attorney and never reporting the client's death.
Her sentencing is scheduled for April 18 in Richmond. While she faces a maximum 20 years behind bars, the district attorney's office said actual sentences tend to be less because the judge can consider other factors while deciding the punishment.
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Bill Atkinson (he/him/his) is an award-winning journalist who covers breaking news, government and politics. Reach him at batkinson@progress-index.com or on Twitter at @BAtkinson_PI.
This article originally appeared on The Progress-Index: Chesterfield woman pleads guilty to federal Medicaid, wire fraud
