Last August American Psychiatric Centers, Inc., doing business in California as Comprehensive Psychiatric Services (CPS), settled its lawsuit alleging fraudulent billing for services never delivered. In that settlement, $2,615,569.32 went to the federal government, but only $134,430.68 went to the State of California.

     That settlement ended the government’s allegations against CPS without any legal determination of liability or any admission of wrongdoing by CPS. 

     Paying $2.6 million to the U.S. government – because the U.S. Justice Department had initiated the lawsuit – pretty much amounts to a bribe to the U.S. government to keep CPS employees from going to jail. If there was enough evidence in the case to prompt CPS to settle out of court for that hefty a sum, it’s fairly certain that that evidence would have convicted them in front of a jury.

     The allegation against CPS was that from Jan. 1, 2015 – Dec. 31, 2022 fraudulent claims were submitted to Medicare and Medicaid for psychiatric services to U.S. veterans which either were never delivered or were incorrectly documented.

     Why did the U.S. Justice Department let CPS walk? They were not only defrauding American taxpayers to pay for services not rendered, they were not providing the services to our military veterans which they were contracted to deliver.

     That CPS out of court settlement is barely a slap on the financial wrist for a company that can afford to pay its psychiatrists between $250,000 and $260,000 per year and its nurse practitioners over $100,000 a year. Compare this with the penalties in two other similar fraud cases last year.

     In December, 2025, Gary Cox, CEO of Power Mobility Doctor Rx, LLC, was sentenced to 15 years in prison and ordered to pay more than $452 million in restitution for conspiring to defraud Medicare and other federal health care benefit programs. In December, 2025, Clifford Wayne Robertson, of Brenham, Texas, was sentenced to 42 months in jail for misappropriating federal grant funds of about $2 million for his Warrior’s Refuge, a homeless veteran shelter.

     If Comprehensive Psychiatric Services $2.75 million settlement last August was not simply bribery to stay out of jail, what was it?