False Claims Research Articles

Lack of evidence for telehealth fraud.

Despite evidence to the contrary, U.S. policy makers, payers, and the public continue to express apprehension that the use of telehealth is associated with increased risk of fraud and abuse. The fraudulent use of telehealth is multifaceted and complex, ranging from potentially false claims to miscoding, inaccurate billing, and kickbacks. For the past 6 years, the U.S. Federal Government has undertaken research studies to examine potential fraud issues related to the use of telehealth, including up-coding time spent with the patient, misrepresentation of the service provided, and billing for services that were not rendered. This article reviews previous efforts to assess the risk of fraud associated with the delivery of virtual care in America, concluding that there is little evidence for higher levels of fraud and abuse related to the use of telehealth.

A meta-analysis of correction effects in science-relevant misinformation.

Scientifically relevant misinformation, defined as false claims concerning a scientific measurement procedure or scientific evidence, regardless of the author's intent, is illustrated by the fiction that the coronavirus disease 2019 vaccine contained microchips to track citizens. Updating science-relevant misinformation after a correction can be challenging, and little is known about what theoretical factors can influence the correction. Here this meta-analysis examined 205 effect sizes (that is, k, obtained from 74 reports; N = 60,861), which showed that attempts to debunk science-relevant misinformation were, on average, not successful (d = 0.19, P = 0.131, 95% confidence interval -0.06 to 0.43). However, corrections were more successful when the initial science-relevant belief concerned negative topics and domains other than health. Corrections fared better when they were detailed, when recipients were likely familiar with both sides of the issue ahead of the study and when the issue was not politically polarized.

Green Funds in a Gray Area


 
 
 Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) funds face tremendous skepticism regarding their impact relative to investor perceptions. In fact, several figures, including media commentators and asset management leaders, have sounded the alarm on ESG investing. They believe investors, especially retail investors, are being misled by funds’ names and largely unhelpful disclosures, and that some fund managers are exaggerating their ESG practices in the name of attracting investors’ money. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has documented evidence of misleading statements regarding ESG investing processes and has brought enforcement actions against companies for making false claims in their disclosures. In an effort to address the lack of standardization and clarity in the ESG fund industry, the SEC proposed two rules in May 2022 that would change the naming and disclosure requirements for ESG funds.
 To examine how ESG funds are naming themselves and disclosing key ESG information, this Note aggregates data collected from the twenty largest ESG mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Based on an analysis of this data—which simulates an investor’s experience attempting to identify which ESG funds best align with their objectives—this Note derives quantitative and qualitative takeaways. The main conclusion is that ESG fund names are often vague and misleading, and neither their names nor their accompanying disclosures describe the funds’ investment strategies in a manner retail investors can meaningfully understand and use to make fully informed investment decisions. This Note calls this phenomenon the “ESG fund labeling problem.”
 
 
 
 In addition to analyzing the ESG fund labeling problem and its impact on retail investors, this Note considers whether the SEC’s two proposed rules from May 2022 will be successful in abating the ESG fund labeling problem. Ultimately, this Note concludes that the proposed rules fall short of meeting investors’ needs in key areas and proposes modifications the SEC can employ to further resolve the ESG fund labeling problem and reduce investor confusion.
 
 
 
 
 

A critical response to Halley's (2022) ‘Audubon’s diary transcripts were doctored to support his false claim of personally discovering Lincoln’s Sparrow Melospiza lincolnii (Audubon, 1834)’

In a recent article (Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 142: 329–342), Matthew Halley contended that John James Audubon (1785–1851) lied about his discovery of Lincoln's Sparrow Melospiza lincolnii (Audubon, 1834) during his 1833 Labrador expedition. Extracts from the naturalist's journal, published after his death in a biography prepared by his widow, Lucy (1787–1874), states that he was aboard ship ‘Drawing all day’ when the specimen was collected by one of his assistants. Consequently, Halley submitted that Audubon’s claim in the Ornithological biography to having first sighted the bird was fabricated and that his granddaughter Maria R. Audubon (1843–1925) doctored her alternate version of the journal to be consistent before she destroyed the original. However, Halley overlooked critical facts, including evidence that Lucy’s manuscript was compiled and edited by others; the published work contained numerous errors; and the journal entries for the previous two weeks were misdated and sometimes conjoined from multiple days, proving that her journal was not a faithful transcription of the original.

In different worlds: The contributions of polarization and platforms to partisan (mis)perceptions

Partisanship, polarization, and platforms are foundational to how people perceive contentious issues. Using a probability sample ( n = 825), we examine these factors in tandem across four political claims concerning US presidential elections and the COVID-19 pandemic. We find Democrats and Republicans differ in their belief in true and false claims, with each party believing more in pro-attitudinal claims than in counter-attitudinal claims. These results are especially pronounced for affectively polarized partisans. We also find interactions between partisanship and platform use where Republicans who use Google or Twitter are more likely to believe in false claims about COVID-19 than Republicans who do not use these platforms. Our findings highlight that Americans’ beliefs in political claims are associated with their political identity through both partisanship and polarization, and the use of search and social platforms appears critical to these relationships. These findings have implications for understanding why realities are malleable to voter preferences in liberal democracies.

Superstitious Beliefs Among Healthcare Providers: A Concept Analysis

Evidence-based practice is a problem-solving approach to healthcare delivery that reflects the best current scientific evidence. When healthcare providers face unexpected changes in a patient's condition or uncontrollable situations during care delivery, they may have less confidence or feel fearful / anxious about the care process and result. As people, healthcare providers may hold beliefs regarding the effect of external, supernatural forces on events, which may lead to superstitious beliefs and behaviors. Also, superstitious beliefs may be adopted by healthcare providers as a mechanism to cope with stress, anxiety, and uncertainty in situations where standard medical practices offer no ready solution. Although superstitious beliefs may help ease anxiety and feelings of failure in healthcare providers, this issue and the effects of these beliefs on medical staff behavior have not been adequately studied. The concept analysis strategy of Walker and Avant (2019) was applied in this study to define this concept and to examine (1) healthcare providers' loss of environment control and domination of irrationality in decision making, (2) the lack of objective evidence to explain cause-and-effect relationships in health-related situations, and (3) how unverified true or false claims become a compliance criterion among healthcare providers. Typical, borderline, and contrary cases were used to explain the concept of superstition in medical staff. The antecedents and possible consequences of healthcare providers holding superstitious beliefs were identified and the empirically addressed measurement tools were evaluated. This analysis may be used to improve the understanding of healthcare workers regarding superstitious beliefs. The results are expected to benefit clinical practice, facilitate further research, and enhance healthcare quality.

An approach to Preliminary Detection and Confirmation of Potential outliers using R: A case of False Suspicion of outliers in data

An approach to Preliminary Detection and Confirmation of Potential outliers using R: A case of False Suspicion of outliers in data

Fraud Detection and Analysis for Insurance Claim Using Machine Learning

Abstract: Insurance fraud is an illegal conduct that is done on purpose in order to profit financially. This iscurrently the most serious issue that numerous insurance companies throughout the world are facing. The majority of the time, one or more gaps in the investigation of false claims has been identified as the primary factor. As a result, the requirement to use computer tools to stop fraud activitiesincreased. Providing customers with a dependable and stable environment while significantly lowering fraud claims. We demonstrated the results of our research by automating the evaluation of insurance claims using a variety of data methodologies, where the detection of erroneous claims would be done automatically using Data Analytics and Machine Learning techniques.

Species boundaries to the limit: Integrating species delimitation methods is critical to avoid taxonomic inflation in the case of the Hajar banded ground gecko (Trachydactylus hajarensis)

With the advent of molecular phylogenetics and the implementation of Multispecies Coalescent-based (MSC) species delimitation methods (SDM), the number of taxonomic studies unveiling and describing cryptic sibling species has greatly increased. However, speciation between early divergent lineages is often defined without evaluating population structure or gene flow, which can lead to false claims of species status and, subsequently, taxonomic inflation. In this study, we focus on the intriguing case of the Arabian gecko Trachydactylus hajarensis (Squamata: Gekkonidae). We generated mitochondrial data (12S rDNA) and genome-wide SNP data (ddRADseq) for 52 specimens to determine phylogenomic relationships, population structure and genetic diversity within this species. Then, we applied a set of different SDMs to evaluate several competing species hypotheses through the MSC. Results show that T. hajarensis is comprised by three well-defined population lineages, two of them in the Hajar Mountains of eastern Arabia, and one in Masirah Island, on the southeastern coast of Oman. Strong mito-nuclear discordances were found between populations inhabiting the Hajar Mountains, but we did not find evidence of current gene flow between them. Surprisingly, discordances in species tree topology were found when different downsampled datasets were used, and especially when linking population sizes, a commonly implemented feature in species tree reconstruction with genomic data. Different SDMs yielded different results, supporting from four species within the group, to T. hajarensis being a single species. With such contrasting results we suggest caution before splitting T. hajarensis. Overall, this study highlights the importance of sample and prior choice and the integration of several SDMs to not incur into taxonomic inflation, providing a set of already available tools to assess population structure, genetic diversity, and SDMs before describing new species.

Can Whistleblowers Root Out Public Expenditure Fraud? Evidence from Medicare

Abstract This paper analyzes private anti-fraud enforcement under the False Claims Act, which compensates whistleblowers for litigating against healthcare providers who overbill the US government. I conduct several case studies of successful whistleblower lawsuits concerning Medicare fraud, pairing new legal data with large samples of Medicare claims. I estimate that deterrence from $1.9 billion in whistleblower settlements generated Medicare cost savings of nearly $19 billion, while imposing low costs on the government. These results suggest private enforcement is a cost-effective way to combat public expenditure fraud.

The Challenge of Diversity in Nursing Leadership: The Need to Avoid Misinformation and False Facts

This article probes two recent (2022-2023) instances of false narratives in nursing, both with the laudable goal of promoting diversity in nursing leadership, but which presentations are flawed by false facts. The first example is the installation of portraits of Florence Nightingale, the founder of nursing, and Mary Seacole, the Crimean War businesswoman and volunteer, at Toronto’s University Health Network and Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. The second is a 2023 article by a nursing academic, Jennifer Woo, urging decolonization of “the history of nursing by magnifying the contributions of nurses of colour”. It includes mention of a number of leading nurses of colour, however with an enormous number of false claims for Mary Seacole. Brief mention is also made of Rappaport’s 2022 revised book on Seacole calling her “a Black Cultural Icon and Humanitarian”. This article goes on to present two leading diversity nurses well worthy of celebration: The Nigerian Kofoworola Abeni Pratt, the first Black nurse in Britain’s National Health Service, who led in Nigerian nurses assuming leadership roles from white, British, expatriate nurses. The other is the redoubtable Mary Elizabeth Carnegie (1916-2008), the African-American nurse who led in the racial integration of nursing in the United States. Consideration is given as well to how such major mistakes are made in the nursing literature, with a recommendation for much more critical reading of sources.

Commonalities in false guilty plea cases

ABSTRACT False guilty pleas, when innocent people are wrongfully convicted by pleading guilty, have beset criminal legal systems since the time guilty pleas came into existence. Today, of the nearly 3,300 exoneration cases catalogued by the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE), about 25% are wrongful convictions via guilty plea, with the remaining 75% by trial. In the present study, we code the known population of wrongful plea convictions, comparing them to the known population of wrongful trial convictions on numerous factors (e.g. dispositional and situational risk factors) to identify defining characteristics of false guilty plea cases. Overall, we found many notable differences. False guilty plea cases are four times more likely to involve a false confession and be the ‘no-crime’ type of wrongful conviction than trial cases. In contrast, trial cases were significantly more likely to involve eyewitness misidentification, forensic science errors, perjury or false accusations, and documented ineffective assistance of counsel claims than false guilty plea cases. Results shed much-needed light on the factors that associate with false guilty pleas.

America’s Occupation of Iraq and its Implications

The US-led invasion of Iraq took place on 20 March 2003. The question that arises is what made the US to invade, occupy, destroy and then to reconstruct Iraq state and to what extend the occupation is legitimate? A debate continued throughout the period of the US occupation over Iraq as to the legitimacy of the US invasion. It first started with the WMD and its threat to the world peace. The war that started in 2003 with the motive of removing Saddam with the false claim of Iraq’s possession of WMD has led to death of thousands of people on both the sides. Despite having no evidence, the Bush administration also tried to convince people that Saddam had a hand in 11 September attack and thus started the invasion of Iraq as a part of ‘war on terrorism’. When US failed to find any link between Saddam and al-Qaeda and the 11 September attack, the public support towards the war gradually declined.

VARIVM ET MVTABILE SEMPER FEMINA: DIVINE WARNINGS AND HASTY DEPARTURES IN ODYSSEY 15 AND AENEID 4

AbstractIn his second appearance to Aeneas in Aeneid 4 Mercury drives the hero to flee Carthage with a false allegation that Dido is planning an attack, capping his warning with an infamous sententia about the mutability of female emotion. Building on a previous suggestion that Mercury's first speech to Aeneas is modelled on Athena's admonishment of Telemachus at the opening of Odyssey 15, this article proposes that Mercury's second speech as well is modelled on Athena's warning, in which the goddess uses misdirection about Penelope's intentions and a misogynistic gnōmē about the changeability of women's affections to spur Telemachus’ departure from Sparta. After setting out how Virgil divides his imitation of Athena's speech verbally and thematically between Mercury's two speeches, the discussion turns to why both Athena and Mercury adopt these deceptive tactics. The speeches are shown to be culminations of the poets’ similar approaches to creating doubt and foreboding around the queens’ famed capacities for using δόλος. Common features in the ensuing hasty departures of Telemachus and Aeneas further confirm Virgil's use of Odyssey 15 in devising Aeneas’ escape from Carthage.

Self-medication during the Era of COVID-19; Potential Implications for Drug Policy Makers and Pharmacovigilance.

The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak is marked by infodemic amid conspiracy theories, false claims, rumors, and misleading narratives, which have had a significant impact on the global campaign against COVID-19. The drug repurposing provides a hope to curb the growing encumbrance of the disease but at the same time, it poses various challenges such as selfmedication using repurposed drugs and its associated harms. During the continuing pandemic, this perspective piece explores the potential hazards of self-medication and its attributing factors along with possible countermeasures.

Originality of Philosophical Methodology of Qādiyānīyya and Ismāʻīlīyya Sects

Shiites believe that the Prophet Muḥammad is the last prophet, but the Imam is infallible also to them as well as the prophet. However, Qādiyānīyya sect sees that the door of prophecy is still open. They believe that Mirzā Ghulām Aḥmad was a Prophet, and that despite this fact that all Muslims believe that Muḥammad was the last Prophet. “Qādiyānī” is an attribution to (Qādiyān), which is a place in the state of (Punjab) in India, where Mirzā Ghulām Aḥmad was born and claimed the prophet-hood. Qādiyānism is made to impersonate the identity of Islamic message and considered a mass fraud. It is the slander and mockery of the prophet-hood of Muḥammad and his message. The difference between Qādiyānīyya and Esoteric Ismāʻīlīyya sects is that Shiites are considered one of the Islamic sects, but Qādiyānīyya sect are considered a non-Muslim minority, so as stated in the fatwas issued by the theologians and scholars of Islam in every Arab-Islamic country that it is a sect misguided and has a false claim that Mirzā Ghulām Aḥmad invented a new religion named Qādiyānīyya. Qādiyānī religion is just a repeating the old drum of the philosophy of Esoteric Ismāʻīlīyya and the social philosophy of Qarāmiṭa. It is adopted by British colonialists. The philosophy of interpretation of Qur’anic verses to Esoteric Ismāʻīlīyya had not grown in Islamic land, but it was resulted from the intellectual Hermes approach of Harran from Sabean and the philosophy of Eliminationists generated by the theory of Emanation of New Platonism.

Guarding Against Catastrophic Biological Risks: Preventing State Biological Weapon Development and Use by Shaping Intentions.

Guarding Against Catastrophic Biological Risks: Preventing State Biological Weapon Development and Use by Shaping Intentions.

Illicit financial flows and extractive commodities: false claims in an UNCTAD report

Illicit financial flows and extractive commodities: false claims in an UNCTAD report

Parental alienation - a valid experience?

The phenomenon of 'parental alienation' is controversial and little explored in the Nordic countries. We wanted to investigate whether parental alienation is a valid concept and how it is perceived in a Nordic context. The study was based on an online survey where the participants were self-recruited. We received responses from 1212 participants. Bivariate and multivariate models were used to test the associations between parental alienation and gender, other intimate partner violence, depressive health problems and reduced well-being. Visitation sabotage and parental alienation are realities for both fathers and mothers. It was most frequently directed at fathers, but such behaviour is not gender specific. Eight different alienation strategies have high internal reliability, and all items contribute to high Cronbach's alpha. Construct validity was confirmed by the fact that parental alienation is strongly associated with visitation sabotage and with other forms of destructive relational behaviour. Visitation sabotage and false accusations increase gradually with the degree of parental alienation. The construct validity of parental alienation was also confirmed by dose-response associations with both mental ill-health and impaired well-being in adjusted analyses. The phenomenon of parental alienation is recognized among parents as a form of harmful behaviour where both mothers and fathers suffer. The construct validity was supported in this study. Such behaviour should be recognized as a form of domestic violence by professional communities in health and social services and be subject to legal action.

Parental alienation in Lebanon: a case report

BackgroundParental alienation is a relatively newly described disorder, with a growing prevalence, as divorce and custody battles are becoming more and more complex with increased difficulty of joint custody. In parental alienation, one parent, the alienating parent, forms an alliance with the child involved in the custody dispute and manages to effectively alienate the targeted parent completely. The child and the alienating parent manifest a form of folie à deux and, hence, are in complete synchrony in the hatred and denigration of the targeted parent. Issues, such as potentially false allegations of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of the child by the targeted parent, arise. The child and the alienating parent become mutually convinced of the targeted parent’s transgressions. Consequently, it becomes difficult for the courts and psychiatric professionals to differentiate true abuse from parental alienation.Case presentationIn this case study, we aimed to conduct an in-depth psychological and psychiatric evaluation of a Lebanese family (white race) where a father was wrongly accused by the mother and his 11-year-old white boy of both physical and sexual abuse. The data for this study were collected through unstructured and semi-structured interviews, observations, and psychological tests (Rorschach test for the parents and Blacky test for the child), and through the analysis of documented evidence presented in the trial.ConclusionThis case manifested most criteria set forth for the diagnosis of parental alienation and created serious doubt regarding the validity of the allegations set forth by the mother and the child. Uncovered parental alienation often misleads mental health professionals at the expense of the child’s mental health .