A senior executive fired from Southcentral Foundation in 2020 signed a plea agreement Tuesday to resolve criminal charges related to his work at the Anchorage-based tribal health care provider.
Kevin Gottlieb and two other dentists, Thomas Kovaleski and Clay Crossett, each agreed to plead no contest to one misdemeanor count of medical assistance fraud. As part of the plea deal, prosecutors dropped a felony charge of falsifying business records and a separate misdemeanor charge of medical assistance fraud.
According to the original charging document in the case, the defendants had listed Gottlieb’s name as the provider of hundreds of dental procedures during the course of their scheme to keep Gottlieb accredited as a dentist. The charges list 20 specific examples of false entries on medical records.
Gottlieb was Southcentral Foundation’s first dentist, hired in 1982, and went on to become its chief of staff and vice president of resource development. He’s also married to its former chief executive, Katherine Gottlieb, who resigned two weeks after her husband’s firing.
Kevin Gottlieb had gone from hands-on dentistry to an administrative role. According to the charges, he needed to perform at least 250 dental procedures every two years to keep his accreditation as a dentist and privileges to use Alaska Native Medical Center.
The trio designed the scheme to falsify patient records starting in 2015 to make it look as though Gottlieb had provided the dental services when he had not actually done the work described in the medical records, the charges say.
A former assistant attorney general in the state’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, James Fayette, noted in the original charging document that the requirements are designed so that dentists have to maintain their dentistry skills.
“At the end of the day, this case is a snapshot of three senior dentists who simply decided that professional records-integrity principles did not apply to them,” Fayette wrote. “The scheme reached the highest level of a major Alaska health care provider and persisted for years.”
Fayette noted in the charges that Gottlieb had not appeared to have benefited financially from falsely maintaining his dental accreditation but said the unit’s investigators speculated that a loss of accreditation, even for a benign reason, would be reported to a national database and might have been seen as a mark against Gottlieb.
Southcentral Foundation is a giant in tribal health care in Alaska, with more than $560 million in revenue in 2023, according to tax filings. It has roughly 2,700 employees and provides care for Alaska Native people from Anchorage and the Mat-Su, as well as support for residents of dozens of villages.
At the time of the firings, Southcentral Foundation said in a message to employees that Gottlieb, Kovaleski and Crossett were fired as the result of an independent investigation that started with an anonymous tip.
“All procedures were performed by qualified dentists, and there was no impact to customer-owner safety,” the message said.
According to the charges, Southcentral Foundation hired an independent investigator who thoroughly examined the issue and turned over his findings to prosecutors.
More than four years later, in early September 2024, state prosecutors with the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit filed criminal charges, albeit confidentially.
Fayette, the prosecutor, asked for a seal on the charging documents, saying in a court filing that it would prevent “premature” media coverage and that public attention on the case could hurt pretrial negotiations with the defendants.
A judge sealed the charges and went a step further, ordering that neither the case nor the defendants’ names be listed in the state’s online court database.
The order to seal the case expired Oct. 25.
On Tuesday, Gottlieb and the others entered no contest pleas on the sole misdemeanor count of medical assistance fraud.
Under the deal, prosecutors are asking a judge to give Gottlieb, Kovaleski and Crossett a suspended sentence of 100 hours of community service and a $2,000 fine, meaning that if they do not commit any jailable offenses for a year, the conviction and penalties will be set aside.
An attorney for the three defendants did not respond to voicemails and an email seeking comment.
A spokesperson for Southcentral Foundation declined to comment, as did prosecutors with the state Office of Special Prosecutions and Medicaid Fraud Control Unit.
Fayette, the unit’s former director, no longer works for the state.
Casey Grove is host of Alaska News Nightly, a general assignment reporter and an editor at Alaska Public Media. Reach him atcgrove@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Caseyhere.
