snip> The men had based their high-pressure seminars on business models taught by the Church of Scientology."

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06098/680573-85.stm Guilty plea in fraud scheme Saturday, April 08, 2006

The jailed owner of the Hemorrhoid Relief Centers of Pittsburgh pleaded guilty yesterday in Columbus, Ohio, to charges in two cases, including one in which he is accused of orchestrating one of the largest health-care frauds in the United States.

Markell D. Boulis, 45, a former chiropractor from Collier who ran seminars across the country designed to illegally boost revenue for chiropractic practices, waived indictment by federal grand jury in Ohio and agreed to become a government witness.

He also pleaded guilty to tax and fraud charges in connection with the hemorrhoid clinics, offenses contained in an indictment handed down in Pittsburgh in February.

Mr. Boulis' Texas lawyer has not returned messages for comment.

Court papers indicate Mr. Boulis and the various corporate entities he controlled ran a complex false billing scheme for hundreds of chiropractors from 1999 through 2003, when he went to jail for cocaine dealing in Cleveland that violated his probation from an old drug case outside Atlanta.

Mr. Boulis had long been negotiating a plea with prosecutors in Ohio, where he had conducted many of his seminars.

Before he went to jail, he had been traveling the country as head of Practice Solutions, which he and his wife, Angel, ran from the basement of their $600,000 house in the Nevillewood golf course community in Collier.

Mr. Boulis patterned the company on another firm called Practice Mechanix, which he had once run in South Florida with a fellow chiropractor and Scientologist until the two split in 2001 in a dispute over money. The men had based their high-pressure seminars on business models taught by the Church of Scientology.

Once he was on his own, investigators said, Mr. Boulis offered chiropractors an $8,000 package of services that promised to increase their collections by using extra billing codes to "back-bill" insurance companies.

Back-billing for previous treatments is legal, but only to correct billing errors. Mr. Boulis submitted back-bills for every patient in a chiropractor's office, usually for treatments never provided.

If chiropractors showed an interest, one of Mr. Boulis' dozen consultants would set them up with another Boulis company, National Insurance Auditors, which handled the extra billings.

While some chiropractors were suspicious of Mr. Boulis, others signed up with his service. At least one has pleaded guilty in the case and helped prosecutors.

A medical supply company owner from Ohio also pleaded, admitting that she worked at the seminars with Mr. Boulis and pretended to be a Health and Human Services official who would teach chiropractors about federal insurance billing.

About a dozen chiropractors in Ohio paid her $17,150, which she has been ordered to pay back as part of the restitution amount.

As part of his plea, Mr. Boulis must pay more than $820,000 in restitution to legitimate chiropractors who paid to attend the seminars and got nothing for their money.

After his seminar days ended, Mr. Boulis branched out into a new business, opening the hemorrhoid clinics here in 2002.

The medical service itself was legitimate, according to authorities, but Mr. Boulis continued to commit fraud by making fake insurance claims to Medicare and not paying his income taxes."

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