A Federal Warrant Names the Out-of-Network Strategy Itself as the Alleged Fraud

On 19 February 2025, an HHS-OIG special agent applied for a warrant to search two Microsoft-hosted email accounts belonging to Christopher Barnett, founder of ABA Centers of America and, until early December 2024, its chief executive. A US magistrate judge approved it the same day, along with an order forbidding Microsoft from telling anyone. The matter was sealed. It was unsealed on 2 September 2025, and the 46-page affidavit is now a public court record.

Trade coverage has described this company's approach as an unusual payer strategy — deliberately staying out of network to command higher reimbursement, which funded 586% growth in three years and a place on the Inc. 5000. The affidavit describes the same practice, and calls it the scheme.

What the government says it was investigating

From paragraph 7, verbatim. The investigation concerns ABA Centers of America for:

"billing both federal and private health care benefit programs for medically unnecessary services, creating false and fraudulent records in order to justify higher reimbursement for services (such as by intentionally misrepresenting a place of service), and fraudulently manipulating and distorting the health care market by mandating that their therapists become non-credentialed with health care insurance benefit programs so that ABACA could bill services at a higher, out-of-network rate."

That last clause is the one to read twice. The allegation is not that the company negotiated hard from outside the network. It is that keeping clinicians uncredentialed was itself the instrument.

The warrant names six target offenses: 18 U.S.C. §§ 1035 (false statements related to a health care matter), 1343 (wire fraud), 1347 (health care fraud), 1349 (conspiracy to commit wire and health care fraud), 1956(h) (conspiracy to commit money laundering) and 1957 (transacting in criminal proceeds). The affidavit further alleges Barnett used proceeds "to make extravagant purchases to support a lavish lifestyle, such as a luxury automobiles."

The numbers in the record

• One parent's child was billed to BCBS Massachusetts at $485,835.00 for approximately four months of ABA. The plan reimbursed $482,618.76.
• A second parent's child had received about five hours a week from prior providers for three years. On starting with this company the child was prescribed 25 to 36 hours a week, plus an hour of parent training. When she pushed back she was told, "We cannot accommodate that little amount of hours."
• She reviewed the care plan and found it recorded her child as unable to do things the child could do — which she took as mischaracterizing the child's limitations to justify the hours.
• A parent asked at intake what he could afford said $25 a month. That became the monthly copayment.
• The same parent's child saw ten to twelve different clinicians. "They came and went like McDonald's employees."

The limits, and they matter

A search warrant establishes probable cause to look. It is not a charge, and it is not a finding. No criminal charges against the company or any individual appear on the public docket, and the affidavit is the government's own sworn account, untested by any defence. The document itself says it "does not purport to set forth all of my knowledge of the investigation." Barnett has served as chairman rather than CEO since around early December 2024.

Separately and still contested: Publix has sued in federal court under the RICO statute, and Point32Health's Harvard Pilgrim counterclaimed for $19 million after the company sued it. Those are allegations in pending litigation.

What you must know or do

• Owners — if any clinician of yours is deliberately uncredentialed, write down why, today. There are legitimate reasons a therapist is out of network: a pending application, a plan that is closed to new providers, a genuinely new hire. The government's theory here is that mandating non-credentialing to capture the out-of-network differential is market manipulation. The distinguishing evidence is a contemporaneous business reason, and the time to have one recorded is before anyone asks.
• Audit your place-of-service codes against your own schedule. Misrepresenting place of service is named as a specific mechanism. Pull last month's claims, compare the POS code on each to where the session actually happened, and find out whether clinic-coded sessions were delivered in homes or schools. This is checkable in an afternoon.
• Check how your copays are set. A copayment fixed by what a family says it can afford, rather than by the plan's benefit, is the pattern that produces waiver and kickback allegations — the same theory in Harvard Pilgrim's counterclaim about routinely waived fees. If anyone in intake is negotiating copay amounts, that stops this week.
• Practicing BCBAs: if an employer asks you not to credential, or to let a credential lapse, get the instruction in writing and keep it. In the account above it is the clinicians' credentialing status that carries the allegation, and the person whose name is on the treatment plan is not the person who set the strategy.
• Everyone: reconcile prescribed hours to documented need. An assessment that records a child as less able than they are, to support more hours, is the allegation here and the red flag in the CMS toolkit both. Take your five highest-hour cases and check that the baseline data supports the authorization.