BENGALURU: The Income-Tax department on Saturday announced that it had unearthed a massive scam, revealing how doctors here make crores of extra money by recommending various tests from diagnostic centres.
Over the past three days, five diagnostic centres and two in-vitro fertilization (IVF) centres in the city were raided. The search revealed that diagnostic centres pay around 35 per cent to the doctors for recommending MRI tests and 20 per cent for CT scans and other lab tests.
The raid on the two IVF centers resulted in the seizure of cash exceeding Rs 1.4 crore, jewellery including bullion exceeding 3.5 kg, a large amount of foreign currency and the unearthing of secret foreign bank accounts in which deposits running into crores of rupees.
In a statement discussing the methods employed by the diagnostic centers, the department said that these expenses were most often disguised as marketing expenses by the centres.
The payment of referral fees to doctors is found to be made in four different ways. These include fortnightly cash payments, advance cash payment to doctors from which the actual amount payable is adjusted, payments by cheque disguised as professional fees and commission agents who move from clinic to clinic distributing envelopes which contain cash and details of the patients referred, tests done, amounts billed and commission amount.
For the professional fee paid by cheque, the centres would enlist the doctor as an in-house consultant. The doctor would not have to actually visit the centre nor see patients. "This payment is a disguised referral feed. There are even some revenue sharing agreements with some doctors," the statement said. The doctors who receive these commissions keep a close watch on the numbers and even return the cash envelopes to the commission agents untouched when they find a discrepancy. The dispute is then escalated to the laboratory management.
The labs searched in the past three days have declared previously undisclosed income which exceeds Rs 100 crore. However, the referral fee in the case of a single lab exceeded Rs 200 crore, the statement said.