By Craig Anderson

WILMINGTON — Connections Community Support Programs will pay $15.3 million to settle two federal lawsuits alleging health care fraud, U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss announced Thursday.

CCSP provided a host of mental health and addiction-treatment services throughout Delaware before filing for bankruptcy earlier this year, authorities said.

“For many years, Connections was improperly billing government programs for mental health services and failing to properly monitor and document its controlled substances inventory,” Mr. Weiss said in a statement.

“These settlements, together with the transfer of all of Connections’ services and operations to providers, finally resolve Connections’ long history of poor legal and regulatory compliance which jeopardized the provision of important mental health and substance abuse treatment to the residents of the State of Delaware.”

According to the statement, claims were made that CCSP “violated the federal Controlled Substances Act by negligently failing to keep proper records of its use of controlled substances, including methadone and buprenorphine, in its treatment of patients with substance use disorders and by transferring controlled substances between locations without proper documentation.”

Also, CCSP allegedly billed “for mental health services performed by individuals whose professional qualifications did not allow them to bill Medicare or Medicaid for reimbursement and by billing Medicaid for mental health services using incorrect procedure codes for the person performing the service, resulting in higher payments than were permitted.”

According to Maureen Dixon, special agent in charge with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General, “These allegations depict CCSP as a health care provider that truly disserviced patients and their federal health care programs.

“Falsely billing Medicare and Medicaid demonstrates a lacking regard for the stability of these programs and the beneficiaries who depend on their services. With our law enforcement partners, HHS-OIG continuously strives to swiftly combat such fraud.”

The United States is also continuing to pursue its claims for violations of the Controlled Substances Act against CCSP’s CEO Catherine Deveney McKay, as well as two other corporate executives, William Northey and Steven Davis, which are not part of the settlement announced Thursday.

CCSP’s sale of assets and operations to Conexio Care Inc. and Coras Wellness and Behavioral Health, was completed June 15, 2021. The two entities began providing mental health and addiction services that CCSP formerly provided, according to the statement.

The Associated Press reported that Delaware Department of Correction officials announced abruptly in March 2020 that they were ending their contracts with Connections, three months before their scheduled expiration. Connections had been DOC’s medical care provider since 2014 and its behavioral health services provider since 2012.

An independent review of Delaware’s prison health care system in 2019 found that it was plagued by poor communications, little accountability and a lack of data collection and analysis, and that organizational changes were needed.

That same year, Delaware lawmakers unanimously approved a bill to form a committee charged with monitoring prison health care. The bill was introduced after the Attorney General’s Office confirmed it was investigating allegations that Connections had ordered staffers to forge documents to falsely state inmates were getting mental health treatment they never received.

In January 2020, Bayhealth Medical Center in Dover filed a lawsuit claiming that it was owed more than $6 million by Connections for medical care the hospital had provided to prison inmates.

Bayhealth spokeswoman Danielle Pro-Hudson said Thursday, “At this time, given that the case is still active, we will defer providing a statement until we have a resolution.”

The Delaware Department of Health and Social Services also utilized CCSP as a contractor.

Attempts to reach DHSS for comment Thursday were unsuccessful.

DOC spokesman Jason Miller said Thursday that no comment was available from the department.