Rogers Businessman Sentenced to 4 Years for Medical Billing Fraud

(Shutterstock)

The former owner of a Rogers medical supply and billing company and its former CEO were both sentenced in a billing and kickback fraud scheme, authorities announced.

Hunter Matthew Burroughs, the 44-year-old ex-owner of Common Compounds Inc., was sentenced in federal court to four years in prison, followed by a three-year term of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay a total of $3.5 million in restitution, primarily to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs, which handles workers’ compensation claims on behalf of federal employees.

The company’s former CEO, Stephen Keith Andrews, 50, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison, followed by a three-year term of supervised release.  He was ordered to pay a total of $2.4 million in restitution.

Andrews and Burroughs were also ordered to pay forfeiture money judgments of $508,838.57 and $4.02 million, respectively. The money represents unlawful gains from the scheme.

Authorities said Burroughs and Andrews defrauded both federal and private workers’ compensation insurers in schemes that ran until 2017. The basic premise of the health care fraud scheme was that Burroughs, Andrews and others associated with the Rogers company recruited physicians to dispense pain creams and patches to their workers’ compensation patients by offering them a split of the profits collected from successfully billing insurers, typically 50%.

The company billed insurers at markups of anywhere from 15 to 20 times what the medications actually cost, and then paid the physicians unlawful kickbacks on amounts collected. Burroughs and Andrews conspired with Louisiana physicians Robert Dale Bernauer Sr. and Robert Clay Smith to have the Rogers company ship medications to the doctors and bill insurers for their prescriptions, despite knowing neither physician had the required Louisiana license to dispense medications.

Bernauer and Smith both pleaded guilty in the case.

The Rogers company’s former billing director, Amanda Dawn Rains, pleaded guilty to her role in scheme in October 2021.