Crown Point Counseling owner charged with forging records

CROWN POINT — The woman who owns and operates local mental health services center Crown Point Counseling was arrested last month for forging records.

Suzanne Krischke (aka Suzanne Bonaventura) was arrested on July 3 for allegedly forging patient documents for a 2019 audit, according to court records.

Records indicate that Krischke was charged with seven counts of counterfeiting records. If convicted on all counts, she’d face 17 and a half years in prison.

Charging documents detailed how Krischke purportedly falsified the signatures of doctors when she was required by the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration, which oversees Medicaid, to resubmit old records for an audit.

Charges described how Indiana Medicaid typically operated on a trust-based system, wherein most claims from enrolled medical providers don’t require individual verification, due in part to the sheer volume of claims.

Crown Point Counseling was first audited in 2017 for reimbursed claims from 2016, after the FSSA notified the mental health provider that 95 of their claims were not complaint.

When the counseling center resubmitted the documents for reconsideration in 2019, auditors noticed “that the documentation submitted for the reconsideration audit was the same documentation submitted for the initial with modifications to make them compliant,” according to the probable cause affidavit.

An employee at Crown Point counseling told investigators that Krischke, supervisors and human resources “made everyone in the office create fake treatment plans in response to an audit. He said the problem of missing documentation stemmed from guidance to therapists that they did not need to create treatment plans until a patient was seen three times,” charges stated.

The FSSA stipulates that practitioners must document some sort of treatment plan within seven days of a patient seeing a provider, the affidavit stated.

A former employee described to investigators how “documents were created to fill in gaps and documents were modified after audits during reconsideration audits at the direction of Krischke.”

He said that he didn’t think Krischke had a stamp or electronic signature from the doctors, so he suspected they just copied the signatures by hand. ­­­­­

Court records indicate that Krischke appeared in Mag. Mark Watson’s courtroom on Monday. Her next hearing is set for September 12 in Judge Gina Jones’s courtroom. ­­­

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