First American Chief Calls Fraud Charges Lies : Health care: Mills says federal investigators haven’t given him a chance to defend himself.

Michael (Jack) Mills, chairman of First American Health Care, said Thursday that federal investigations charging his firm with Medicare fraud are based on “blatant lies.”

Investigative reports by the General Accounting Office and Health and Human Services Inspector General June Gibbs Brown have relied on alcoholics and discredited former employees for their information without ever giving him the opportunity to defend himself, Mills said.

“The son of a bitches haven’t asked me for anything,” Mills said, referring to federal investigators. “We have been wiped out of the picture.”

Robert J. Gettings, a special agent who participated in the GAO investigation, declined to respond to Mills’ remarks, saying, “The report speaks for itself.”

An HHS investigation earlier this year found evidence that First American billed everything from country club dues to alcoholic beverages to a Medicare program that pays for elderly to receive health care in their home. The department is attempting to bar First American from Medicare.

Meanwhile, the GAO charged in a draft audit that First American had billed the government for gifts given to physicians as an incentive to get patient referrals and have records altered. A First American spokesman said Medicare guidelines had long allowed the firm to give small gifts to physicians and that now federal officials are claiming such practices are fraudulent.

Mills vowed that when he gets his day in court, “we will whip their ass standing on our heads.” He added: “The federal government has looked up my skirt for six years. I have not been indicted. I have not been charged. They have never found anything they could charge me with. I have won at 200 appeals with the government and we ain’t lost one yet.”

In a telephone interview from the firm’s Brunswick, Ga., headquarters, Mills said many of the disputed costs, such as country club fees and lease payments on a BMW automobile for his son, were never billed to Medicare.

Much of the $14 million in allegedly improper payments over a one-year period cited by HHS involved the accounting treatment of custom software developed by IBM for the firm’s automated data processing, Mills said.

First American sought reimbursement for the software in a single year, rather than depreciating the software, a company spokesman said. At issue is $9.8 million the firm received. Ultimately, the accounting treatment resulted in less reimbursement than what the firm would have received with depreciation, he added.