Mesa Business Owner Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison for Health Care Fraud

PHOENIX — A Mesa woman was sentenced this week to 66 months in prison for defrauding Arizona's Medicaid program.

Diana Moore was also ordered to pay more than $21 million in restitution to the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) after pleading guilty to wire fraud and money laundering on July 10, 2023.

According to the Arizona U.S. Attorney’s Office, the 44-year-old woman fraudulently billed AHCCCS. She took advantage of a billing program that allows Native Americans to receive health care before a pre-payment review. Nearly all of the AHCCCS enrollees Moore billed were part of the American Indian Health Plan.

Moore owned two behavioral health consulting services, Harmony Family Services and Harmony Family Services II, and also applied for another behavioral health consulting service, Logan Family Health, LLC.

In January 2020, Moore began collecting AHCCCS member ID numbers by paying other vendors to transport members to his own facility for a single day.

Once the members left its facilities, it billed AHCCCS and claimed to have provided those members with treatment for up to 90 days.

Moore falsely claimed that his facilities provided counseling services to enrollees for at least eight hours a day, five days a week, for months at a time, although Moore did not provide these services.

She was ordered to forfeit four homes, seven luxury cars, designer clothing, expensive jewelry and artwork. All of these items, more than 100 items in total, were purchased by Moore with money she obtained through her fraudulent scheme.

“Diana Moore’s conviction should remind us that this type of criminal behavior has serious consequences,” said Carissa Messick, Special Agent in Charge of the IRS CI’s Phoenix Field Office, in a news release. “IRS CI works methodically to bring fraudsters to justice and restore trust in our public programs.”

In sentencing, the court said Moore's fraud disproportionately affected Native American populations in Arizona.

“The American Indian Health Plan exists to help an underserved community overcome barriers to treatment,” U.S. Attorney Gary Restaino said in a news release. “The defendant abused this program and the unique identification numbers it generated for her own benefit – in some cases by billing patients she never treated, and in other cases by falsely inflating the length of treatment. We thank the Internal Revenue Service for its financial acumen in bringing the defendant to justice, and the AHCCCS Office of Inspector General for its invaluable assistance.”

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