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Taxi firm cons the NHS out of £250K
A courier firm swindled the NHS out of £250,000 for journeys that never happened. A Sunday Mirror investigation has revealed how Lewis Day Medical Services billed for phantom trips supposed to have been made by a non-existent driver.
The bogus driver, "Stuart Villas", was given a false North London address and fake contact numbers. He was also given a driver number - MCO1 - and a computer file was set up to list all the "journeys" he made on behalf of London's Imperial College NHS trust.
An average of 20 journeys were faked EVERY DAY, and the scam lasted for more than 18 months. The minimum charge for each journey was £8.60. But some cost cashstrapped hospitals £109 a time.
In one instance Villas's fake ID was used to charge £73.20 to take a patient with lung disease just two miles home. In fact, the trip had been cancelled hours before because the patient was too ill to travel.
Journeys were fabricated in two ways by employees of Lewis Day, who run a fleet of cars to ferry patients too sick to make their own way to hospital but not so ill as to need an ambulance. Trips were either completely invented or invoices were sent for trips which had been booked then cancelled. Hard-pressed NHS staff had no reason to disbelieve them and processed the invoices.
The fraud took place from October 2006 to February last year and involved the Charing Cross and Hammersmith hospitals. It came to light when an insider - furious the NHS was being so brazenly ripped off - contacted the Sunday Mirror.
Our investigators were passed a secret file listing all the fraudulent journeys relating to Villas. We handed the evidence to the NHS, who called in their own detectives. Lewis Day subsequently agreed to pay back £281,894 to Imperial College NHS Trust.
Despite the fraud being discovered, Lewis Day will carry on working for Imperial College NHS Trust because it is tied into a contract. And there is no prospect of anyone being prosecuted. But our revelations leave a question mark over the suitability of Lewis Day, who boast on their website that they are Britain's "fastest growing passenger car and courier company," continuing as an NHS contractor.
A source said: "All other hospitals who use Lewis Day will now be checking the books. If there are any signs of discrepancies there could be further investigations." Lewis Day hold multi-million pound contracts with 22 hospitals in Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Oxford, Swansea and Warrington. Their five-year contract with Imperial Trust, which runs out next year, is their biggest hospital deal, worth £6million a year.
The con was only uncovered when an NHS office worker found Stuart Villas's file. The staff member had never heard of him and noticed that his journeys were cancellations. The insider reported it to managers, but no one listened.
The whistleblower said: "When I found the list of journeys I was confused and asked what the hell was happening. But two senior members of staff at Lewis Day told me not to ask about it again. When I heard that, I knew the journeys were a fraud. I looked again and saw thousands that should never have been charged for. "I was horrified. I don't blame the NHS. They had so many journeys to pay for each month that to check each one would have taken forever.
Invoices were just signed. The contractor knew of a gap in the system and seized on it. The NHS put faith Imperial College NHS Trust on June 11, 2008. An NHS Counter Fraud spokesman said: "Following receipt of information concerning alleged irregularities of the contract between the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and the company Medical Services (part of the Lewis Day Group)... an investigation was conducted.
"This led to the renegotiation of that contract and as a result the reimbursement of £281,894.58. NHS Counter Fraud would like to thank the Sunday Mirror for bringing this to our attention. It goes to show that we take all information seriously, investigate and where appropriate aim to recover the proceeds."
A Lewis Day spokeswoman said: "In mid-June 2008 the company became aware of a problem with repeat bookings. Some journeys had not been cancelled when the patient no longer required transport. In a number of cases jobs were allocated when there was no patient need.
Those unused or unneeded journeys had been charged for. This was dealt with by the company and they notified Imperial College NHS Trust of the problem on June 19, 2008.
The director responsible for setting up and implementing the system has since left the company." Joe Sheehan, Lewis Day's head of Medical Services, said changes had been made so it couldn't happen again. We have put in a whole new system. What happened was not repeated across other trusts," he said.
On a single day - January 16, 2008 - an astonishing 28 taxi trips were faked, ripping off the NHS to the tune of £867. Alongside journeys of a few miles costing £10 or £20, there were fares to destinations up to 35 miles away.
The single biggest false claim of the day was a £109 trip in a specialist vehicle to Chalfont St Peter, Bucks, from West London's Charing Cross Hospital.
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