Sentencing — amount of loss

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United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Criminal

Sentencing — amount of loss — restitution

Absent evidence of mistake, the circuit court properly included all overbillings in calculating amount of loss and restitution when sentencing a defendant for healthcare fraud.

“The government has identified a pattern of a large quantity of improper OASIS coding to achieve overpayments, and Orillo has acknowledged that she reviewed all OASIS forms and altered the forms to obtain overpayments. The district court has based its loss calculation on those payments to Chalice that were not supported by the medical records and therefore not reflective of the care provided. Unlike Littrice and Schroeder in which the taxpayers had an independent incentive to inflate the numbers, Orillo cannot even argue that other persons may have been attempting to defraud the government; she argues only that the overpayments could have been attributable to mistakes. She has not singled out any claims or records to illustrate the possible mistake, instead relying on speculation. As in Littrice, that is insufficient to call into question the calculations by the district court. See also United States v. Austin, 54 F.3d 394, 402 (7th Cir. 1995)(rejecting factually unsupported speculation in a challenge to the loss amount). In fact, the speculation that the overpayments were the result of human error is belied by the numbers.”

Affirmed.

12-3128 U.S. v. Orillo

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Kapala, J., Rovner, J.