NeuroScience founder sentenced and fined for fraud
The head of a western Wisconsin laboratory has been sentenced, fined and harshly admonished after being found guilty of conspiring to defraud the federal government.
Gottfried Kellermann, 76, of Osceola, was sentenced Thursday by U.S. District Judge James D. Peterson to a six-month period of home confinement, a $50,000 fine, and five years of probation for intentionally violating Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments regulations. Kellerman’s co-defendant, NeuroScience, was sentenced to a five-year probation period and a $140,000 fine for conspiring to defraud, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Kellermann is the founder and CEO of NeuroScience and its sister company Pharmasan Labs. In the sentencing, the court found that Kellermann was "fundamentally unrepentant" and that his allocution showed "he was a self-deluded charlatan" and that the public needed to be protected, according to a press release from the Justice Department.
According to the court, Pharmasan conducted neurotransmitter testing, and NeuroScience recommended nutritional supplements to Pharmasan patients based on the results of the testing. When Pharmasan's neurotransmitter testing did not produce consistent results for patients, Kellermann manipulated the results unbeknownst to federal regulators and patients. NeuroScience then recommended nutritional products to the patients identified as abnormal but the Justice Department said the optimal range was not valid and was "significantly narrower than the range required by federal regulators." Kellermann and his companies, who were convicted in October, hid the range and that fact it was not valid from federal regulators and from their patients.
In 2015, Pharmasan was ordered to pay the federal government $8.5 million to settle claims that it submitted false billing information to Medicare. Federal prosecutors said the settlement resolved allegations that Pharmasan and its billing company, NeuroScience, also violated Medicare rules on services referred by practitioners who weren't doctors.
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