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A Windsor pharmacist may have been disorganized when it came to tracking his stock, but there can be no innocent explanation for how he came to bill the province $341,000 for prescriptions police allege he never dispensed, his fraud trial heard Monday.
Rocco D’Angelo, 63, is accused of defrauding the Ministry of Health with bogus billings between February 2009 and November 2011. He is charged with fraud over $5,000 and breach of trust.
By withholding payment on later billings by D’Angelo, the government has already recouped $204,000 of the alleged fraudulent billings.
“Sloppy record-keeping” alone can’t explain the discrepancies uncovered by a Ministry of Health audit in 2011, assistant Crown attorney Tom Meehan told the court. The audit results were turned over to the Ontario Provincial Police which launched its own investigation and arrested D’Angelo nearly three years later.
D’Angelo, a pharmacist since 1977, was one of the owners of Royal Windsor Pharmacy. He owned a 51 per cent share of the downtown pharmacy and managed it on behalf of three other shareholders, his trial heard.
He remains licensed to practise in Ontario. The Ontario College of Pharmacists lists him as a pharmacist at the Downtown Windsor Pharmacy able to “provide patient care.”
In 2011, the Ministry of Health received a tip from a pharmacist in London about a suspicious dispensing pattern related to a patient who had once lived in Windsor. The patient, on a regular regimen of medication including anti-psychotics, had moved to London where he ended up in hospital. When the hospital looked up the man’s prescription history, a pharmacist found prescriptions were still being registered as filled by Royal Windsor Pharmacy.
John Quan, a pharmacist who works for the Ministry of Health auditing pharmacies, said he found Royal Windsor had billed the province for 121 prescriptions under the man’s name in a four-month period in 2011. Quan testified D’Angelo told him the prescriptions had been “filled in error.”
Under questioning by defence lawyer Dan Scott, Quan conceded it’s possible that someone at the group home where the man lived while in Windsor could have been taking delivery of the man’s prescriptions after he moved away. But, Quan said, if that were the case, D’Angelo should have been able to produce a delivery log showing the prescriptions had been dropped off.
Quan said his audit further discovered the pharmacy billed the Ontario Drug Benefit Program for $80,000 worth of nutritional supplement Ensure without being able to prove it ever had enough stock to fill that many prescriptions for it. Quan said patients prescribed Ensure have their doctors fill out forms to get the cost of the supplement covered by the government. D’Angelo could not provide documentation to prove the patients qualified to get the supplement for free, Quan said.
Quan said Royal Windsor’s billings for the ultra-expensive hepatitis medication Pegatron were also suspicious. In some cases, the quantity of the drug billed to the province exceeded the quantity specified by the prescribing doctor, and again, D’Angelo could not provide invoices from the drug wholesaler to prove he had the drug in stock when the prescriptions were filled, court heard.
Quan conceded he could not prove whether D’Angelo was working the days the prescriptions were logged or billed to the province. Court heard pharmacies use a computer program to keep track of stock and bill the province.
Court heard Quan himself has been charged criminally in relation to his work as a pharmacy auditor. He was accused of stealing three tablets of Lorazepam from a pharmacy in Windsor he was auditing. Quan testified he went to trial last year and was acquitted.
His trial is scheduled for three weeks before Superior Court Justice Christopher Bondy.