FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Friday, June 21, 2024

Contact: Tony Mangan, Communications Director, 605-773-6878

PIERRE, S.D. – South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley announces that a Rapid City woman has been ordered to pay $42,000 in restitution after earlier pleading guilty to one count of Grand Theft by Embezzlement.

Jessica Scott, 38, was sentenced after changing her plea to guilty in April. She was sentenced to five years in prison, with all five years suspended; and she was sentenced to 180 days in the Pennington County Jail with 90 days suspended.

Scott was a former board member at the Adult Day Center of the Black Hills.  She altered billing documents, which resulted in more than $477,000 of overpayments from the South Dakota Medicaid Program, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and the South Dakota Department of Human Services.

Ordered restitution, which was paid the day of sentencing, will go to the Adult Day Center, which had to pay back $114,000 to Medicaid and $362,000 to the Department of Veterans Affairs as well as to multiple veterans who had to pay insurance copays on healthcare services they did not receive. The Adult Day Center has already returned the overpayments. The $42,000 the defendant was ordered to pay will be used by the Adult Day Center and the veterans to pay expenses not reimbursed in another way.

“This defendant violated the trust of Adult Day Center, the agencies involved, and most importantly, the people she served,” said Attorney General Jackley. “Thank you to the participating agencies for working together to resolve this issue.”

This investigation was a joint effort between the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit of South Dakota Attorney General’s Office; Federal Agents with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of the Inspector General, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General; and the Rapid City Police Department. 

The Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Unit prosecuted the case.

South Dakota’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit receives 75 percent of its funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under a grant award totaling $615,068 for Federal Fiscal Year 2024.  The remaining 25 percent, totaling $205,019 for FY 2024, is funded by the state of South Dakota.

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