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A toxicology lab agreed to pay $27 million to resolve False Claims Act cases that arose from a whistleblower complaint by a Baltimore social worker.

California-based Precision Toxicology agreed to pay the Maryland state government, the federal government, the whistleblower and others over claims that it billed Medicaid programs for unnecessary drug tests and gave doctors kickbacks, according to news releases.

Bryce Hudak, director of the University Psychological Center – Recovery Network in Baltimore, a treatment center that referred patients to Precision for testing, was the original whistleblower.

His 2018 complaint prompted a federal and state investigation “into a scheme operating within the drug testing industry, in which profits — and fraud — have increased as the opioid epidemic has spread nationwide,” states a news release from Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown.

Three False Claims Act lawsuits, two of them in federal court in Maryland, followed.

Hudak will receive $2.7 million. Maryland will receive $5.7 million, and the federal government will receive $18.3 million. The remainder will go to at least five other states.

The plaintiffs accused Precision, one of the country’s biggest drug testing labs, of billing government health care programs for excessive and unnecessary drug testing from 2013 through 2022.

“In particular, the government plaintiffs contended that Precision caused physicians to order excessive numbers of urine drug...

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