Thanks for your professional insight into this issue. Do you think any of this implicates Romney?
Most of the time, I think directors should know more about what's going on than they know or than they claim to know. Then again, I've been involved in government investigations where the government's discovery turned up *audiotapes* of the chairman of the board involved in the destruction of troublesome documents. This, after depositions in which the chairman claimed no knowledge of what the officers and executives had been doing.
This company lost money for three years. Then it's making money. And there has to be a sudden increase in tests performed. If the reports seen by the board are detailed, then the number of tests performed grows disproportionately to the number of encounters. Even patients who were having one test performed are now having four tests performed, at a minimum, for those patients for whom Damon was ordering the automatic three-panel tests (without physicians' orders).
So it all depends on what the board saw. If the board saw too much, then all of the board knew too much and should have seen that something improper was going on. If the board saw too little, then the board should have asked "why this turnaround?" And it's difficult for the officers to answer that in a manner that doesn't say "ummm, fraud?" to any directors with clinical laboratory experience. You would like to assume at least one member of that board had relevant experience with the industry, some knowledge of the market, some background to permit him or her to make or approve grand policies.
Nothing I've seen implicates Romney. But this isn't my first rodeo. This is what I do. If the board of Damon didn't know, it was incompetent, or the officers and executives were geniuses in disguising it. And even then, some audit, should have shown it.
The Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services didn't publish a proposed compliance plan for clinical laboratories until December 18, 1998. Damon, Quest, and the others were the reason the OIG did that.