A HEALTH insurance employee has been convicted of submitting more than 100 false claims to her employer and pocketing the rebates.
Wyndham Vale resident Abimbola Dada, 37, took about $8100 from Medibank Private over a 10 month-period from September 2011 to last June while employed as a claims processor at the Broadmeadows branch.
Last Wednesday, Werribee Magistrates Court heard the offend- ing was first detected in June after a Medibank audit team launched an internal investigation.
Investigators found she had lodged the false claims during work hours.
The mother-of-two pleaded guilty to putting in false claims for medical treatment that her family never received. She said she lodged the false claims because her family was “under a lot of financial pressure”, citing rent, childcare and school fees, money regularly being sent to relatives in Nigeria, and a mortgage on a house. Dada had kept the fraud secret from her husband.
She said she had known what she was doing was wrong, and had tendered her resignation before the investigation began to stop herself from submitting any more false claims.
The court heard that Medibank had exercised a zero-tolerance policy after investigators uncovered the fraud and the matter was referred to police.
Magistrate Bernard Fitzgerald rejected the suggestion that financial pressure was any excuse for the offending.
Dada was convicted and given a 12-month community corrections order, requiring 200 hours of unpaid community work. She was ordered to repay the outstanding sum of $7514 to Medibank.
