Word: gerber
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gerber's scheme, a former insider at the department tells TIME, "was to short-circuit the money before it reached the university" and thus have his department directly receive payments. To bypass the university's accounting service, Gerber had one of his secretaries rent an outside post-office box under the name "Tulane Pathology Group." Bonnie Jones Jackson, who was in charge of billing for the department, said she was sent twice a week to pick up checks from the mail drop. At first she did what she was told without asking questions. But gradually it began to occur...
...question Marrogi and other doctors began to ask themselves was what was happening to the money. They focused on Gerber's life-style. Earning $325,000 a year, Gerber had a $7,000 monthly mortgage on a $1.2 million home in an exclusive New Orleans neighborhood. A signed sketch by Picasso was placed eye-catchingly near the front door. He had two, possibly three, Mercedes-Benz, a $300,000 condo in Colorado and a $345,000 house in Florida. He also had more than $3 million in an investment fund and several hundred thousand dollars in a trust fund...
Around the office, Gerber was known for charging an average of $1,200 a month for lunches and an additional $2,000 to $3,000 for dinners. "The irony," says a witness, "is that he never ate lunch. He used to prefer tofu sandwiches." A witness told the IRS that when Gerber traveled to Dubai on a recent trip, he charged the university the full cost of the trip, despite the fact that his hosts picked...
Witnesses say they informed IRS investigators that Gerber had begun storing cash in dormant bank accounts that were unlikely to be examined during a routine audit. Money transfers out of the university system were masked by fictional purchases of equipment. One piece of machinery was billed at $500,000, despite the fact that the top of the line in its category costs $60,000. The person for whom the equipment was ordered never received it. The department regularly processed reimbursements for conferences that never existed. The department was able to get away with the irregularities because...
Then one inaccurate patient's bill was reported to an inside billing agency, causing a ruckus in the school's official accounting system. The dean of the medical school, James Corrigan, eventually insisted he had given Gerber permission all along to do his own billing. But the alarms had alerted the IRS, and it soon swooped...