Wifredo A. Ferrer, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, and José A. Gonzalez, Special Agent in Charge, Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), announced that Angelo Ponds, 32, of Miami Gardens, and Sean Guillaume, 31, of Miramar, were sentenced February 21 for their participation in a stolen identity tax refund scheme relating to a health care provider. Ponds was sentenced to 48 months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release. Guillaume was sentenced to 94 months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release.
Both defendants previously pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the government, in violation of Title 18, United Stated Code, Section 286, and one count of aggravated identity theft in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1028A.
According to court documents, Guillaume worked for a company that performed medical laboratory tests where he had access to medical records with names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers (personal identity information or “PII”) of individuals in the course of his employment with that company.
During the conspiracy, Guillaume stole PII from the company and sold five thousand individuals’ PII to Ponds. Guillaume knew that Ponds would use the PII for the filing of fraudulent and unauthorized tax returns. Ponds caused other individuals to file false and fraudulent tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) seeking refunds using the PII provided by Guillaume.
Mr. Ferrer commended the investigative efforts of IRS-CI. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael N. Berger.
SOURCE: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Florida
The healthcare provider was not named in any of the press releases or court filings and so far, I’ve been unable to nail it down conclusively and/or whether it is related to another similar case involving a testing laboratory in Florida named in another case. That other case involved Apex Laboratory, and that breach was never reported to HHS, according to a spokesperson for HHS. Was the breach involving Ponds and Guillaume ever reported to HHS? It doesn’t appear to have been based on Florida entries described on HHS’s public breach tool.
So is this a separate incident involving a second lab or the same lab? Apex Laboratory reportedly learned of their breach in July 2012 from law enforcement. According to the Grand Jury indictment in the Ponds and Guillaume prosecution, that data theft occurred from in or around January 2012 and continued through on or about March 28, 2013, suggesting that these might be two different cases – or at least two different facilities.
And were all the patients whose data were misused by Ponds and Guillaume notified and offered harm mitigation?
Hopefully, HHS will open an investigation into these two criminal cases to determine whether the covered entity or entities involved met all their data security and breach obligations.