Former Johns Hopkins Radiologist Imprisoned for Submitting False Reimbursement Requests

A doctor from southern Connecticut has been ordered to serve 366 days in prison and pay almost $600,000 for falsifying travel expense reimbursements to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,.

Between 2007 and 2015, while a physician at JHU’s Division of Vascular and Interventional, Jean-Francois Geschwind, MD, submitted several fake requests for travel reimbursement that added up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, in 2013, he received reimbursement from JHU for a two-week family vacation to Europe by claiming the purpose of his trip was to give lectures about his work at JHU.

He also finagled multiple reimbursement checks for the same expense, including the price of three roundtrip fares to Japan for the Asia Pacific Primary Liver Cancer Expert meeting in July 2015. Before the event, he received reimbursement for his roundtrip flight from a French life-sciences company. However, two months prior, he had already received payment for the same expense from JHU, but neglected to mention that he had already submitted a reimbursement request to another payment issuer. Soon later, when he became the Chair of the Department of Diagnostic Radiology at Yale School of Medicine, he received another check for the same flight from Yale.

After conducting an audit, Johns Hopkins investigators discovered Geschwind had submitted multiple fake travel expenses. Originally facing a maximum sentence of up to 20 years, Geschwind reached a plea bargain, and last month U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz sentenced Geschwind with a year and a day of prison time and three years of supervised release.