Madigan
CHICAGO (Legal Newsline) - Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan obtained a judgment on Tuesday against a Chicago contractor that allegedly billed the state for drug tests it never performed.
The agreed order requires Anita Mahajan and her Chicago company, K.K. Bio-Science Inc., to pay more than $393,000 in restitution. The settlement also permanently prohibits Mahajan from contracting with the state of Illinois.
"This company blatantly defrauded the state and reaped hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars by submitting bills for work that it never performed," Madigan said.
The judgment is the result of Madigan's civil lawsuit filed against K.K. Bio-Science Inc. and Mahajan in March 2009, which alleged that the defendants knowingly billed the state from at least January 2004 until November 2006 for drug tests it failed to perform on behalf of the Department of Children and Family Services in child custody cases.
The state awarded K.K. Bio-Science a no-bid contract to conduct DCFS drug testing in 1997. By 2003, the number of DCFS clients required to submit to drug testing at K.K. Bio-Science had significantly dropped. The company, however, allegedly continued to bill the state at similar historical rates for several years on a monthly basis.
DCFS terminated its contract with K.K. Bio-Science in January 2007. The company was involuntarily dissolved in December of that year.