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Source: Montgomery Advertiser, Ala.迷你倉Oct. 20--At least three people in Elmore and Montgomery counties have been prosecuted in the past five years for taking between $20,000 and $116,000 from nursing home residents' financial accounts, part of some 1,500 cases nationwide.A USA Today investigation found that since 2010, thousands of nursing homes nationwide had been cited for mishandling residents' funds. The facilities manage the funds for residents who request the service; the funds operate something like a bank account.Dr. William Geary, the director of the Bureau of Health Provider Standards for the Alabama Department of Public Health, said last week investigations are usually handled by the Alabama Attorney General Office's Medicaid Fraud Unit. Nursing homes, he said, have a powerful inventive to ensure that funds are managed properly.Finding evidence of criminal activity could mean a home being "excluded from Medicare, which is death to a facility," Geary said. "You can't function as a facility in America today if you are excluded from the Medicare program."The overall extent of the issue is unknown, but Geary said nursing homes must do cost reports every year, and are subject to random audits from Medicaid."They're accustomed to Medicaid people coming in and doing a week-long audit of their books," he said. "It's hard for them to hide gross thefts of their residents' money."The three cases prosecuted by Alabama Attorney General's office since 2007 include:?? Joseph Feagin Jr., 35, who was accused of misappropriating $115,734.61 from trust funds at Wetumpka Health and Rehabilitation Center. According to the Attorney General's office, Feagin routed money from accounts with credit balances to himself, his boyfriend and 31 acquaintances. Feagin pleaded guilty in 2010 to theft of property and was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to repay the funds he stole.?? Anne Marie Jones, 41, who was accused in 2007 of drawing checks from a trust fund in South Haven Heath and Rehabilitation in Montgomery. The Attorney General's office says Jones, an accounts-payable clerk, wrote 314 checks totaling nearly $91,000 that she either cashed or deposited into her account. Jones later pleaded guilty to a charge of theft of property in 2008 and was sentenced to three years in prison and five years probation. According to court records, Jones was placed on supervised probation release in 2010.?? Marsha Kim Knighten, 42, who worked as a business office manager at South Haven. Knighten was accused of f文件倉rging the signature of another employee on checks drawn from the trust fund, and then depositing the checks into her personal account. Knighten was accused of taking $20,174.56. She pleaded guilty to theft of property and forgery charges in 2010; she was sentenced to three years in prison.The Legislature last spring passed a law sponsored by Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, that makes it a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison to take more than $2,500 from an elderly person. Stealing between $500 and $2,500 could lead to a sentence of up to 10 years in prison, while stealing less than $500 could lead to a year in jail.Annalise Impink, a spokeswoman for Atlanta-based Sava Senior Care, which runs South Haven Health and Rehabilitation, said last week she was unable to immediately comment on Jones' case, saying the records there had been moved offsite. On the Knighten case, Impink said the company learned of the situation after a "family concern regarding a refund after a resident's death." The company said it notified the Attorney General's office immediately and cooperated with it throughout the investigation.The Knighten case impacted 20 residents, Impink said, but South Haven reimbursed any losses they sustained."We took a number of steps to assure that the theft did not recur, including centralizing management of resident trust fund reconciliations, centralizing the issuance of resident trust fund bank statements to assure that they are accurate, auditing the trust funds on a routine basis, requiring approval for all checks written over $500, and requiring monthly training for all employees regarding management of the resident trust funds," Impink said in an email.The company did not pay any fines related to Knighten's case, Impink said.The Wetumpka Health and Rehabilitation Center referred questions to its parent company, NHS Management, located in Birmingham. Brandon Farmer, a spokesman for NHS Management, said Feagin's case was uncovered by internal audits; NHS restored money lost to residents."We found our internal mechanisms and corporate controls were effective in this matter," he said.The Attorney General's office said in a statement it averages between two and four complaints each year, with referrals coming from the Alabama Department of Public Health's licensure and certification division.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, Ala.) Visit the Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, Ala.) at .montgomeryadvertiser.com Distributed by MCT Information Services存倉