Medicaid fraud conviction reversed again to reinstate guilty verdicts

(FOX 9) - A Minnesota appeals court said a jury had enough evidence to convict the owner of a Medicaid provider agency in a multimillion-dollar Medicaid fraud case.

Medicaid fraud conviction reversal

What we know:

The Oct. 26, 2026, opinion reversed the district court’s post-verdict acquittal and remanded the case for reinstatement of the jury’s guilty verdicts, according to the Minnesota Court of Appeals.

The court ruled that the record contained enough circumstantial evidence to support six counts of aiding and abetting theft by swindle.

Local perspective:

According to the opinion, the case centered on Promise Health Service LLC, a Medicaid provider agency Yusuf and his wife opened in 2018.

Promise was first listed in Burnsville before Yusuf later changed its address in state records to a Central Avenue location in Minneapolis.

Investigators who searched that Minneapolis location in 2022 found Promise was using a mailbox instead of a physical office, the opinion said. The court also said Promise records were mixed with records from other provider agencies there, including businesses tied to Yusuf’s family.

Dig deeper:

According to the opinion, Minnesota charged Yusuf in June 2024 with racketeering and six counts tied to fraudulent billing from October 2019 to August 2022.

After a seven-day trial, the district court dismissed the racketeering charge before jurors considered the remaining counts.

The jury convicted Yusuf on all six theft counts and found aggravating sentencing factors, the opinion said. The district court later threw out those verdicts, but the Court of Appeals on Oct. 26 said the guilty findings should be restored.

Evidence and jury verdicts

Dig deeper:

The appeals court said Yusuf repeatedly identified himself as Promise’s owner, manager, contact person and authorized agent. The opinion also said he helped set up Promise payroll in May 2020 and signed checks from a Promise business account, including checks to his brother, Mohamed, labeled as loans.

Trial evidence also described false paperwork and services that did not match the billing, according to the opinion. A former employee testified she created client documents without meeting recipients and copied and pasted sections, while other testimony said Promise billed for more overnight care than was provided, used documents a recipient said she did not sign and billed a minor client for more service hours than were authorized.

Why you should care:

According to the opinion, Promise submitted more than 40,000 fraudulent reimbursement claims and fraudulently received more than $7.2 million. Each of the six charged time periods involved more than $35,000, and some topped $1 million.

Investigators testified that Yusuf personally received more than $1 million from Promise accounts, while Mohamed received more than $359,000, the opinion said.

The same testimony described more than $361,000 in payments with no identified business purpose, more than $2.5 million paid to people without background studies, more than $268,000 in peer-to-peer transfers and more than $400,000 in retail purchases, including more than $56,000 at Nordstrom, more than $3,000 at Canada Goose and more than $14,000 at Feldmann Imports.

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