Ohio's highest court has indefinitely suspended the law license of the former general counsel at Tampa, Florida-based insurer WellCare Health Plans Inc. convicted for his role in a scheme to defraud the Florida Medicaid program.

The Ohio Supreme Court, however, gave Thaddeus M.S. Bereday credit for the time he has served since Nov. 27, 2017, when his license was suspended on an interim basis after his felony conviction in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida on one count of making a false statement involving a health care benefit program. In so doing, the Ohio court adopted the recommendation of the state's disciplinary board.

Bereday, who lives in Tampa and received his Ohio law license there in 1993, could not immediately be reached for comment about the court's action.

Bereday was indicted in March 2011 along with four other former WellCare executives. As part of his June 2017 guilty plea to the charge, for which he was sentenced to six months in prison, Bereday admitted that he, along with others, knowingly and willfully submitted, on behalf of one of WellCare's subsidiaries, a false 2006 expense report to the Florida Medicaid program, a single incident the Ohio Supreme Court took into account when opting to give Bereday credit for time served under his interim felony license suspension.

In a previous case in which the court declined to grant credit for time served, that lawyer's “actions were distinguishable, in part because he had engaged in a criminal conspiracy that spanned more than 11 years and arguably diverted more than $140 million in federal contracts away from other businesses that actually qualified for the money,” the court said in its opinion. “Here, the board … concluded that the span of Bereday's misconduct was not as egregious as the 11-year course of fraudulent conduct in” the earlier case.

The court recognized several other mitigating factors in Bereday's case: his clean disciplinary record; his payment of $3.5 million in restitution; his “full and free” disclosure to the disciplinary board and cooperative attitude toward its proceedings; the fact that he had been subject to other criminal and civil sanctions for the same misconduct; and the presentation of witness testimony and 16 letters of reference attesting to his character and reputation.

“As aggravating factors, the board found that Bereday had a dishonest and selfish motive and that he had engaged in multiple offenses, as shown by the separate criminal and civil judgments against him [and] that his conduct had harmed Florida's Medicaid program, despite the fact that it was Bereday's duty, as WellCare's chief compliance officer, to ensure that this type of fraud did not occur,” the court said.

Although Bereday received credit for his time served, the court adopted the board's recommendation that he complete or be released from his three-year term of supervised release imposed by the federal judge in the Florida criminal case before petitioning to have his license reinstated.

Bereday was represented in the disciplinary matter by solo practitioner Jonathan Coughlan of Columbus, Ohio, who declined to comment on the case.