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The Nevada Attorney General’s Workers’ Compensation Fraud Unit is racking up points for successful prosecutions.
An investigation by the unit has resulted in the conviction of a former Las Vegas resident for defrauding the State Industrial Insurance System (SIIS).
In 1988 the man paid $400 and used an alias to purchase a workers’ compensation insurance policy for a phony company. Less than a week later, using his real name, the man claimed that he was injured while working for the company. From 1988 through 1992, he collected over $115,000 in medical and disability benefits from the state system.
For the conviction of using false statements to receive SIIS benefits, a gross misdemeanor, he was sentenced to one year in prison. An additional conviction on a forgery count, a felony, earned him a fouryear sentence. While he serves the sentences concurrently, he’ll be doing a lot of thinking of a plan, hopefully legal, that will allow him to pay $115,651.11 in ordered restitution to SIIS.
Another feather in the Fraud Unit’s cap resulted from convictions of the president and vicepresident of Entra, Inc., a Las Vegas concrete construction company.
They were convicted of gross misdemeanors for submitting false payroll reports to SIIS.
Between January 1, 1991, and December 31, 1993, Entra, Inc., and its corporate officers knowingly submitted false documents which underreported payroll to SIIS. The false documents resulted in the corporation paying workers’ compensation insurance premiums of approximately $450,000 less than what was required by law. The fraud was discovered during a routine audit by the state system, and the case was promptly turned over to the Nevada Attorney General’s Office.
The combined efforts of the Attorney General’s investigators and the audit division at SIIS culminated in Entra, Inc., being assessed $800,000 in administrative fines and being ordered to reimburse the state for $450,000 in back premiums.
The officers and the corporation each pleaded guilty to a gross misdemeanor and were given maximum fines and ordered to pay $7,500 in investigative costs to the Nevada Attorney General’s Workers’ Compensation Fraud Unit. “This one case resulted in over $1,000,000 being funneled back into the Nevada system,” said Frankie Sue Del Papa, Attorney General of the state of Nevada.
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