Man found guilty of defrauding Optum of over $1 million

A man has been found guilty of stealing over $1 million from the company that is investigating multiple programs suspected of fraud in Minnesota.

U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen announced that after a six-day jury trial, Karan Gupta, 47, was found guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, 10 counts of wire fraud and one count of money laundering.

Court records note that Gupta was a senior director of data analytics at Optum, Inc., a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group headquartered in Minnetonka.

In 2015, Gupta reportedly hired a friend who was unqualified to work at Optum in a managerial data engineering position, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Gupta allegedly gave the friend a fake resume, became his supervisor, and then, for almost four years, the friend did no work for Optum but collected a salary above $100,000, which increased each year and included bonuses.

The attorney’s office said the friend paid Gupta more than half of his salary in kickbacks through a New Jersey bank account, which Gupta then accessed from ATMs in California.

The scheme was discovered after Gupta was fired in November 2019 for a different fraud case. Gupta’s fraud cases against Optum totaled more than $1.2 million, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“Those who manufacture fraudulent schemes to appropriate money from legitimate businesses must be held accountable for their criminal conduct,” said Rosen. “Kickback schemes and no-show jobs undermine legitimate businesses, and the perpetrators must suffer the consequences of their actions.”

The state of Minnesota is paying Optum over $2 million this year to review claims for 14 programs that the Minnesota Department of Human Services has deemed most susceptible to fraud, or “high-risk.”

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