A dentist pleaded guilty on Friday (4 May) to receiving over $400,000 in Medisave disbursements to his company by submitting false claims on behalf of patients under the Central Provident Fund scheme.

Ang Kiam Hau Steven, 43, was convicted in the State Courts of 30 charges of cheating and dishonestly inducing a delivery of property in 2011 and 2013. A total of 253 other charges committed between 2011 and 2013 will be taken into consideration for sentencing.

The court heard that Ang joined The Smile Division Dental Group (TSD) as a dentist in 2007 and he later set up a company in 2011. At the time of the offences, Ang received about 56 per cent of the net fees from surgeries carried out by him at TSD’s Lucky Plaza clinic and this was paid to his company.

Sometime in 2009, Ang came up with a scheme to make false Medisave claims by targeting underprivileged patients who could not afford dental surgeries they needed.

Ang’s staff would ask patients to show them their Medisave account balance by logging onto the Central Provident Fund Board’s (CPFB) website. If the patients could not pay for the procedure in cash, they would be offered a “package” where TSD would treat them at a rate lower than the market rate and help them in claiming the cost of the treatment from their Medisave savings.

Essentially, Ang would certify that day surgeries had been performed on patients on multiple dates, when they were actually done on a single day or over two days, in order to dishonestly induce the CPFB to disburse multiple claim amounts to the Lucky Plaza clinic.

He did so in order to circumvent the daily withdrawal limits for day surgeries imposed by the Ministry of Health (MOH). The false claims came up to a total of $434,241.

In some instances, treatments were purportedly carried out on patients over a number of dates in 2013 but a check of immigration records revealed that the patients or the dentists on duty were not in Singapore on those dates.

Sometime in 2011, the scheme was implemented in other TSD clinics and was not restricted to only underprivileged patients.

On 14 July 2014, MOH made a police report stating that there were inappropriate Medisave claims made by various dental clinics. MOH discovered that the total amounts claimed from Medisave by certain clinics within TSD were higher than the total amounts claimed by other clinics that had handled more cases in 2013.

Ang has since paid $535,571.12 – the principal amounts claimed plus interest – to the CPFB, which then credited into the respective Medisave accounts from which the amounts were disbursed.

Ang’s lawyer Navin Shanmugaraj Thevar told the court he needed more time to prepare mitigation and sentencing submissions.

District Judge Kan Shuk Weng will hear sentencing positions from the prosecution and the defence on 26 June.

If convicted, Ang faces a maximum jail term of 10 years and a fine.

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