Walgreens pays $106.8 million to settle prescription billing fraud charges

Walgreens Boots Alliance has agreed to pay $106.8 million to settle taxes it fraudulently billed to the U.S. government for prescriptions that were never filled, the Justice Department said Friday.

The Justice Department said Walgreens violated the federal False Claims Act between 2009 and 2020 by submitting payment claims to Medicare, Medicaid and other health care programs for prescriptions it processed but were never picked up.

Instead, Walgreens resold the same prescriptions to other patients without reversing the original payment claims, causing it to be paid twice and receive tens of millions of dollars for prescriptions it never filled, a said the department.

The Deerfield, Illinois-based drugstore chain did not admit liability in agreeing to settle.

“Due to a software error, we mistakenly billed some government healthcare programs for a relatively small number of prescriptions that our patients submitted but never picked up,” Walgreens said in a statement .

“We corrected the error, reported the issue to the government and voluntarily refunded all overpayments.”

Friday’s settlement resolves three whistleblower lawsuits filed in Florida, New Mexico and Texas.

The Justice Department said the payment took into account Walgreens’ cooperation and its “significant” steps to modernize its internal pharmacy management system to ensure billing problems do not reoccur.

Walgreens previously repaid $66.3 million in settled claims and is being credited for that amount.

The chain recently operated about 8,600 stores in the United States, but said in June that it plans to close a significant number of underperforming stores over the next few years.

Steven Turck, a former Walgreens pharmacy manager who filed the Texas case, will receive $14.92 million in the settlement. Andrew Bustos, a former Walgreens district pharmacy supervisor who filed the New Mexico case, will receive $1.62 million.

(Reporting by Stempel in New York; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)