Under the Collar

In January, the Fourth Circuit became the sixth Circuit Court in the country to hold that the crime of identity theft does not require the use of a living person’s identity.  In United States v. George, No. 19-4125 (Jan. 9, 2020), the United States appealed a district court’s dismissal of an aggravated identity theft charge where the defendant had used the identification of a deceased individual to purchase a home. 

Unlike regular identity theft, which punishes the unlawful use of another’s means of identification with a sliding scale of maximum potential terms of imprisonment ...

The United States Justice Department takes health care fraud seriously and has for many years. Several years ago, when I was still a federal prosecutor, I attended a conference on the topic at the National Advocacy Center in Columbia, South Carolina. There, I heard about the biggest cases coming out of Detroit and South Florida and the analytical tools that were being used in what were the hotspots for health care fraud in America. I brought those strategies back with me to West Virginia and began using them to identify outliers, or those doctors who were billing in amounts that were ...