Colorado Physician Kickback Case: National Speaker Fees for His Own Staff

The Colorado physician kickback case involved approximately $344,000 in payments to induce prescriptions for a fentanyl spray. In its account of the criminal case, the Justice Department reported that the physician admitted prescribing in exchange for payments. If you worked in the practice or arranged its speaker programs, the audience, the payment and the prescription schedule may be parts of a business you recognize.

The physician practiced pain medicine and owned Red Rocks Center for Rehabilitation in Golden, Colorado. The criminal indictment alleged that Insys used a speaker bureau to pay him for prescribing its fentanyl spray, Subsys. The supposed work was teaching other medical providers. The alleged bargain was more prescriptions and higher doses, with speaker payments supplying the incentive.

A National Speaker With a Staff-Only Audience

The indictment alleged that the company paid the physician at its highest speaker level, with fees of $2,400 to $4,700 per program. The national rate applied even when the event took place in his own clinic. We see a national speaking fee buying an audience already on the physician’s payroll.

In 2013, the indictment identified 17 programs attended only by his own staff. The same two physician assistants were the only medical providers attending most of those staff programs. The Justice Department’s later account put payments for the purported staff programs at more than $40,000.

The indictment also described a presentation entered on a sign-in sheet that never occurred. It alleged that no medical providers attended, yet the sales representative completed the program paperwork and the physician received payment. For an employee who was there, the gap between an event record and an actual presentation is concrete. A signed form can say a lecture happened. The people in the office can explain what the form leaves out.

More Programs in Exchange for More Prescriptions

The indictment alleged an explicit exchange between prescribing and paid speaking opportunities. Company employees sought commitments to a prescription count or revenue goal before allocating programs. When the physician wanted more paid events, he allegedly suggested that he might prescribe competing drugs or could no longer commit to prescribing the company’s spray.

One sales representative’s text to a supervisor made the alleged bargain unusually plain. The indictment quoted the representative describing how more speaking work would keep the physician from moving to a competitor:

According to the indictment, the physician also gave the sales representative access to patient files and reviewed his schedule with her to identify patients for the spray. That allegation puts the commercial relationship inside the practice’s daily work. The sales discussion reached beyond who would speak at dinner and into which patients might receive the drug.

Company-Paid Office Work Was Part of the Exchange

The alleged benefits extended beyond speaking checks. The indictment said the company assigned an Area Business Liaison to the physician’s office to perform prescription-related administrative tasks that would otherwise fall to his medical assistants and office staff. The company also called these employees Business Relationship Managers. The indictment also alleged payments for advisory boards and training events, opportunities the physician solicited from the company.

That office work matters because a kickback can be a service as well as cash. The 2020 Journal of Forensic and Investigative Accounting review, A Forensic Accountant’s Guide to the Most Potent Federal Laws Used Against Healthcare Fraud, explains that the Anti-Kickback Statute reaches compensation paid directly or indirectly, in cash or in kind, for federally funded prescribing and other business. A company can benefit a physician by taking work off the practice’s hands. We would examine that work alongside the payments and the prescriptions the company expected in return.

Medicare and Medicaid Paid for the Prescriptions

The indictment alleged that Medicare and Colorado Medicaid paid millions of dollars for the physician’s fentanyl-spray prescriptions. It described a drug approved for adults with breakthrough cancer pain, with prescriptions usually costing thousands of dollars a month. Higher doses cost more, giving the alleged push for higher-dose prescriptions a direct financial purpose. The speaker fees went to the physician. The public health care programs paid for the prescribed product.

The HHS Office of Inspector General’s speaker-program alert identifies weak educational substance and sales-driven speaker selection as reasons to examine a program. In this case, the indictment supplied the practice-level detail behind that concern: repeated staff audiences, prescription commitments and company access to patient information. We see an educational label sitting over an alleged sales bargain, with taxpayers paying the drug bills that bargain was intended to generate.

Novartis Shows the Manufacturer Side

Novartis admitted in a separate settlement that it paid for nonexistent speaker events and that some representatives intended payments to induce prescribing. The Justice Department’s July 2020 announcement concerned the manufacturer’s programs for cardiovascular and diabetes drugs. It shows the same relationship from the company side: a payment described as compensation for education, used to influence the physician’s prescribing.

The Colorado indictment adds allegations about how that relationship operated inside the physician’s practice. Read together with the Novartis admissions, those accounts point to a useful question for an insider: what did the company expect the doctor to do after the speaking fee arrived?

What Someone Inside the Practice Can Explain

The useful evidence connects records that describe the same transaction differently. In the Colorado indictment, the program paperwork described a presentation, while the alleged exchange concerned prescriptions and revenue. A practice employee may know who attended, whether anyone spoke, what company staff did in the office and how the doctor’s schedule entered the sales conversation. Someone administering the speaker program may know why another paid event was offered.

Those perspectives show what the payments bought. We work with insiders to connect what they saw to the compensation, prescribing expectations and government-paid claims. A whistleblower case under the False Claims Act can pay 15% to 30% of what the government recovers.

You Saw Who Was in the Room

If you handled the speaking checks, sat through the staff programs or watched a sales representative help choose patients for a drug, talk with our whistleblower experts about the exchange you saw. We develop your case around that knowledge and bring in healthcare fraud whistleblower lawyers who understand pharmaceutical payments and physician prescribing. You have us beside you as partners from the first conversation through the pursuit of a recovery.