The Royal Gazette, a Bermuda newspaper, recently exposed reports that the former director of the Atlanta-based National Conference of Black Mayors, Vanessa Williams, made false claims about her authority to organize a conference on the island, and spent five days in Bermuda on a site inspection trip earlier this month, paid for by the Corporation of Hamilton (Bermuda). This is actually pretty serious, because these fam tours are paid for by public funds entrusted to the tourism and other agencies to be spent on marketing the country to legitimate potential buyers.
On recent trips to Colombia, Korea, Mexico, Turkey, the Philippines, and other international medical tourism destinations where I’ve traveled, I have either met personally or seen photos of previous fam tour participants that I know had no real business purpose to be there, other than to be used as props to in some cases, advance certain agendas or act as “window dressing”. In the USA, if this were paid for by a Department of Tourism, Economic Development, or other government agency and one penny of public funding was used to fund the trip, I could file what is known as a “qui tam” complaint against the imposter.
In common law, a writ of qui tam is a writ where I could, as a private individual who assists a prosecution, receive all or part of any penalty imposed. Its name is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur, meaning “who sues in this matter for the benefit of the state as for myself. Lawyers are familiar with this in the USA, but they often blow off the significance because, in healthcare, for instance, when one whistle blows on a doctor, hospital or medical supplier such as a lab, the cases are long, drawn out, and can be career ending for the whistleblower – so most attorneys say “don’t bother” unless the payoff is pretty much assured, and you are ready to leave healthcare. But in medical tourism, let’s be honest: many facilitators and other industry participants were doing something last month and can do something else next month, especially if there’s more money to be made blowing the whistle than there is facilitating medical tourism.
To date, I have witnessed phony entourages of certain companies, consultants and organizations, and also individuals out for a vacation on the destinations’ budget. These have included insurance brokers that no longer work for a big name insurance company, but still have business cards leftover and introduce themselves skillfully as “connected with” or otherwise related to that insurance company, even though their LinkedIn profiles, for example show that they separated employment with that company (not as an executive decision maker, but as a registered sales agent (one of thousands)) months prior to the trip. I’ve seen people on trips that have no website as a facilitator, an expired website, email addresses with “hotmail, aol, and gmail as their email service provider, meaning that they have not yet established a business, or have no corporation, or registered domain, but parading as experts on the speaker circuit.
So the next time, you see one of those imposters on the trip, ask yourself: What would it take to file a whistleblower claim with that entity. Because the rewards are high. People who are not affiliated with the government can file actions against someone perpetrating fraud against the government. Persons filing under the Act stand to receive a portion (usually about 15-25 percent) of any recovered damages. The False Claims Act provides a legal tool to counteract fraudulent billings or expenses paid for by the government. In many countries, they also have these laws as part of their anti-corruption policies. As a person legitimately in medical tourism, when I see a government inviting imposters to a limited attendance also hurts those who would have otherwise been invited, but were shut out because the money was spent on the imposters, instead.
One additional thing to consider, is that if the perpetrator is an individual, even if there are civil monetary penalties, recovery may be difficult to collect if there are no assets, and even with assets, the country harmed has to be willing to take action.
Please don’t misinterpret my message here. I am not against people exploring medical tourism options as a business, or exploring destinations to which they may never send a patient. That’s not fraud. My message is to those who misrepresent their authority to contract on behalf of insurers, employers, those who misrepresent their role or commit sins of omission in introducing themselves, and those who have already quit the business, and gone on to something else, but go on the free trip anyway. They hurt the opportunities for the rest of the market.
