IBARAKI (TR) – Ibaraki Prefectural Police have arrested a midwife in Tsukuba City for allegedly defrauding assist funds for a free COVID-19 testing program two years in the past.
According to police, Yuki Ogawa, 51, is suspected of falsifying invoices to make it seem that she performed 487 COVID-19 exams at her Tsukuba Midwifery Clinic Smile Birth between April and August 2022.
The falsifications netted her roughly 7.7 million yen in assist funds, police stated. Ogawa is believed to have concurrently submitted invoices for precise exams and solid invoices for exams by no means administered.
As reported by Nippon News Network (Sep. 18), police haven’t revealed whether or not she has admitted to prices of fraud and forgery.
According to police, Ogawa collected solely a few dozen specimens for PCR testing and outsourced them to a laboratory over that interval. She is believed to have solid invoices for exams and padded the subsidy purposes.
According to the prefecture, the clinic utilized for about 6,500 subsidies between March 2022 and May 2023 for about 42.93 million yen.
In June and July 2021, the prefecture started inspecting previous purposes following fraudulent submissions by different companies. It was at the moment that suspicions of fraud arose because of the massive variety of purposes.