Fraud Suspect Linked to Drug Test Reviews

The Southern California Gas Co. is investigating whether Gerald Barnes, the man arrested by the FBI earlier this month for masquerading as a physician, conducted drug test reviews on its employees, 15 of whom were fired for positive results, a gas company spokeswoman said Thursday.

The utility contracted with the Executive Health Group, the clinic where Barnes was allegedly employed as a physician for nearly a year, to review employee drug tests and conduct physical examinations, said Jeri Love, a company spokeswoman.

The actual drug tests were conducted by a lab not affiliated with the Executive Health Group, but Barnes may have played a role in evaluating as many as 13 test results, Love said.

Six of the 19 gas company employee drug tests taken during the time Barnes was allegedly employed were reviewed by other physicians in New York, Love said.

If Barnes was the physician supervising the tests, they could be invalid, said Harry Strahl, director of safety and enforcement for the California Public Utilities Commission, which oversees implementation of federal drug testing regulations for gas company employees involved in “safety sensitive jobs” such as building pipelines and turning on gas service at homes.

In a transcript of an arbitration hearing for one fired employee, supplied by his labor representative, Barnes identified himself as the only physician in the Executive Health clinic who reviews drug test results. Paul Frankel, president of the Executive Health Group, confirmed that claim.

“We certainly would not have hired him had we had an inkling of a suspicion that he was not a doctor,” Frankel said, adding that the company checked Barnes’ medical license number and medical references before hiring him.

“A medical license is something that my children can reproduce on a home Macintosh if they really put their mind to it,” he said. “If the states took as much care in issuing medical licenses as they do in [issuing] driver’s licenses, I think we could all have more faith in the doctors that carry those licenses.”

Under regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Transportation, a drug test must be reviewed by a “medical review officer,” a licensed physician who determines whether prescribed medication might have caused a false positive result.

Gas company employees, some of whom are represented by the Utility Workers Union of America, were outraged at the possibility their members may have been fired unjustly.

“The purpose of the [medical review officer] was so that . . . a medical doctor could look at the tests and see if there was a reason for the positive” results, said Beatty Henson, business manager for the union, who supplied the arbitration hearing transcript.

“We are now looking into the legalities of whether or not we can have these tests thrown out.”

Barnes, 62, was arrested April 15 and charged with fraud for practicing medicine without a license at the Executive Health group from July 1995 to April 1996. He is being held without bail in a federal detention facility in Los Angeles. Barnes was sent to state prison in 1981, 1984, 1989 and 1991 for convictions related to impersonating a physician in health clinics in Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties.

Barnes served his first sentence for involuntary manslaughter in the death of a diabetic patient whose condition he misdiagnosed at an Irvine clinic.

Three days after Barnes’ arrest, Executive Health officials informed the gas company of Barnes’ possible role in reviewing drug tests, Love said.

The company sent out a memo to more than 5,000 employees and launched its own investigation, she said.

Love said she cannot predict when the review will be completed because all of Executive Health’s files related to Barnes’ service have been confiscated by the FBI, which is conducting its own probe.

In the arbitration transcript supplied by the union, Denise Castillo, a gas company official, identifies Barnes as the medical review officer in one employee’s case.

In the transcript, Castillo said that Barnes was required to “notify the employee of the result when it is positive” and to ask employees for any “medical reason why” the test might be positive.

According to federal regulations, the company is informed of the drug test results directly by the medical review officer, not the lab that conducts the tests.

“I don’t think the [transportation department] made any provisions for something like a charlatan or a person masquerading as a physician,” said Strahl of the Public Utilities Commission.

“I may have to send one of our investigators to Los Angeles to look at the records that this man [played] a role in. We are going to follow [this] with the [gas company] to see what the results are.”