A Brooklyn day care owner has pleaded guilty to bribing Medicaid patients to enroll in his program, then billing for services that were never actually provided — a scheme that ran to roughly $65 million and makes him the tenth person to plead guilty in a case that’s still unfolding.
What the DOJ’s release actually says
The U.S. Department of Justice announced on October 2 that Ahsan Ijaz, 29, of Brooklyn, pleaded guilty to charges connected to a social adult day care Medicaid fraud scheme totaling approximately $65 million in fraudulent claims, according to the DOJ’s own press release. Ijaz is the tenth defendant to plead guilty in this case. Sentencing is scheduled for March 10, 2027, with a maximum possible sentence of 10 years.
How a social adult day care billing scheme actually worked
Social adult day care programs are a real, legitimate category of Medicaid-covered service — they provide supervised daytime care, meals, and activities for adults who need support but don’t require full nursing-home-level care, letting families keep working while a relative is looked after. That legitimacy is exactly what a scheme like this one exploits: the program type itself is real and serves a genuine need, which makes fraudulent billing against it harder to distinguish from normal operations without a close audit.
DOJ’s release describes bribing patients to enroll — meaning Ijaz allegedly paid or incentivized Medicaid beneficiaries to sign up for his program — and then billing Medicaid for services that were never actually delivered to those patients. Both halves of that pattern had to work together: enrolled patients to generate billable claims, and claims for services that didn’t happen to inflate the amount billed per patient.
Why “tenth defendant to plead guilty” is the detail that matters most
A single guilty plea tells you one person broke the law. A tenth guilty plea in the same case tells you this was a coordinated operation involving multiple people playing different roles — patients, recruiters, billing staff, or other day care operators — all connected to the same underlying fraud.
That scale is worth sitting with. $65 million in fraudulent claims isn’t the output of one person working alone; it’s the kind of number that typically requires a network willing to participate at multiple points in the process, which is exactly what ten separate guilty pleas suggests happened here.
What “bribing patients to enroll” actually looked like
DOJ’s release frames the enrollment piece as bribery — patients were given some form of payment or incentive specifically to sign up for the day care program, independent of whether they actually needed or wanted the services on offer. That’s a different mechanism than a day care simply overbilling for real patients who showed up for real care.
It means the patients themselves, in a scheme structured this way, may have been recruited as a means to generate billable enrollment numbers rather than being genuinely served by the program they were nominally attending — a detail that matters for understanding who else, beyond the defendants themselves, may have been affected by this.
What this case says about Medicaid fraud enforcement broadly
A $65 million scheme with ten guilty pleas and counting is a significant prosecution by any measure, and it reflects a broader, sustained federal enforcement push against healthcare billing fraud — a category that costs taxpayer-funded programs billions of dollars annually across all kinds of providers, not just day care operators specifically.
This case doesn’t tell you anything about the day care industry broadly being untrustworthy. It tells you that this specific operation, investigated and prosecuted over what was evidently a lengthy process given the number of pleas involved, was built on fraud from the start.
What “guilty plea” means for where this case stands now
It’s worth being precise about the stage this case is at. Ijaz has pleaded guilty — this is a resolved admission of guilt, not an allegation or pending charge, and reporting it plainly as a guilty plea reflects DOJ’s own announcement. Sentencing hasn’t happened yet; March 10, 2027 is still ahead, and the 10-year maximum cited is a ceiling the judge could impose, not a confirmed outcome.
What this means if you or a family member uses a day care program like this
If you or a relative currently uses a social adult day care program funded through Medicaid, this case isn’t a reason to distrust the category of service itself — it’s a reminder that keeping a general sense of what’s being billed under your or your family member’s name is a reasonable habit, the same way checking a medical insurance statement for services you don’t recognize is worth doing regardless of any specific fraud case.
If something on a Medicaid billing statement doesn’t match services you or your family member actually received, reporting it to your state’s Medicaid fraud control unit is a direct, practical step — not an accusation, just a flag worth raising.
Where this case goes from here
March 10, 2027 is the next date that matters — Ijaz’s scheduled sentencing. Whether more defendants beyond the current ten will be charged or plead guilty as this case continues isn’t addressed in the available release, so this article stops at what DOJ has actually confirmed rather than guessing ahead of it.
A $65 million scheme, ten guilty pleas and counting, and a sentencing date still five months away — that’s the case as it stands today, reported exactly as far as the record currently goes.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Womens Overview editors prior to publication.