Fertility Clinic Doctors Owe Campus $2.47 Million, Audit Says

The three UC Irvine doctors who allegedly stole eggs harvested from women undergoing fertility treatments at four Southern California clinics owe the university $2.47 million, mostly from unreported revenue, according to a state auditor’s investigation released Wednesday.

The auditor found that the three once-acclaimed fertility experts, Ricardo Asch, Jose Balmaceda and Sergio Stone, failed to report $7.83 million in revenue from their partnership with the university. The university’s share of that is $1.47 million plus $782,000 interest, the auditor found.

In addition, the doctors owe $216,000 on revenues they did report to UC Irvine, but which the university failed to collect.

Auditor Kurt Sjoberg blamed not just the doctors, who he said cheated the university of money, but the university as well.

“The findings highlight the rather lax administration that existed at UC Irvine with respect to its agreements with physicians who work at the university, so lax that literally millions of dollars are owed to the university by just these three physicians,” Sjoberg said in an interview Wednesday.

“The university needed to have greater accountability and an assurance that the state was receiving the fees that it deserves under its agreements with its physicians.”

Until 1995, the university’s contract with its doctors, called the Clinical Compensation Plan, worked on an honor system. Doctors would report their incomes to UC Irvine. Based on the reports, the doctors would pay assessments to the school.

In 1995, UC Irvine and the other four University of California campuses with medical schools revised the compensation plan to require that clinic revenue be deposited in bank accounts maintained by the university.