The other VBS: SA staff unpaid for months as US agents probe healthcare group for fraud

Former South African employees of a healthcare company being investigated for fraud in the United States (US) say they are still owed hundreds of thousands of rands in unpaid salaries.

Virtual Benefit Solutions Hearing Clinic, which somewhat confusingly used the acronym VBS - the same as the scandal-plagued bank that collapsed in 2018 - set up shop in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg in early 2022. The bankrupt bank and the healthcare group are unrelated.

VBS Hearing Clinic quickly employed half a dozen South Africans to work as medical billers, submitting codes to claim payments for clients from insurance companies and government healthcare providers in the US. Much of the work involved Covid-19 tests.

One former staff member, who worked as a medical biller, said the company and its CEO, Tyrone Moore, arrived promising them a bright future with secure employment, high salaries and the chance to get in on the ground floor. But staff said the promises were empty, and the company failed to pay them months of salaries before it abruptly shut its offices in September last year.

Now, VBS Hearing Clinic and Moore are being investigated for healthcare fraud, conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud and the submission of bogus healthcare claims by special agents of the US Health Department, working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Detailed application

The case is laid out in a detailed application for a search warrant to seize the group's emails, online communications and financial documents. The warrant was signed off this month by a California judge, meaning the authorities may already have access to private files. VBS Hearing Clinic has not submitted its version of events.

The ongoing probe may help former South African employees searching for answers about why the company they hoped to build their futures with abruptly ditched them.

Staff News24 spoke to said many former VBS employees are in a worse position today than before they started working there. Many have been forced to take lower-paying jobs just to make ends meet.

"It has had a huge impact on us," a former employee, who asked not to be named as he was still owed money by the company, said. "To just lose a job and not get paid was hard — we have families and children."

VBS Hearing Clinic did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Its South African website is offline, its phones are out of order, and queries to local email addresses bounced back.

'Doing work for the US'

The source, who worked for VBS Hearing Clinic for more than a year, said he heard from a friend in early 2022 that a US healthcare company was looking for workers at branches it planned to open in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg. He applied and got a job as a medical biller. He said that perhaps two dozen people were employed at its offices, maybe more. Most worked as billers.

He was told the work would involve billing South African companies that VBS Hearing Clinic was planning to work with. But first, he and his colleagues needed to help with a 'backlog' of work from VBS’s operations in the US.

"We were billing based on a system in the US," he said. "We were all doing work for the US... claims, payments, for medical aids and governments."

VBS was still legally required to pay its staff as it had signed contracts with them. Since then, the company has paid them nothing, despite repeated promises that money was on the way from the US. "Every week, they were briefing us, briefing us."

The source said Moore would come once or twice a month for a meeting on WhatsApp or Teams, telling them they must "hang in there". He claimed he was there to "change our lives".

"He said he is working with his accounts; they are not sleeping day and night." Staff were promised bonuses for being patient.

But as September 2023 approached, employees started to worry that the company was trying to "push this matter up until September, when we are going to have no say". This would be a year since they started their year-long contracts.

Searching for assets

That same month, some employees approached the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation, and Arbitration (CCMA) in a last-ditch bid to force VBS to pay. By this time, the company had apparently closed its branches in Cape Town and Durban.

At a CCMA hearing in September in the Western Cape, two former employees won an enforcement order against the healthcare group, which failed to appear at the hearing.

"I have no reason to doubt the applicants' claims as demonstrated during their evidence under oath," stated the commissioner in a ruling. "I am satisfied that employees have established their claims for moneys owed to them."

The two employees managed to get three months of outstanding salaries after the sheriff raided VBS's offices in Johannesburg and attached assets, but only a handful of staff received anything.

Others were worried that the company would refuse to pay them anything if they took legal action. The source said staff were convinced to sign a document stating that they would get one month's salary if they stopped their legal claims.

Not all employees who approached the CCMA got paid, despite winning their cases, as the sheriff couldn't track down anything to attach.

"There was no one, VBS was gone," the source said.