Bengaluru: The IT raids on two IVF clinics, doctors, and five medical diagnostic centres in the city, unearthed Rs 100 crore of undisclosed income and Rs 200 crore of referral fee in the case of a single lab. Officials of the Income Tax department (Investigation) in Bengaluru carried out raids and search operations on two IVF clinics /doctors and five medical diagnostic centres over the last three days.
"The searches in the IVF centres/doctors resulted in seizure of cash exceeding Rs 1.4 crore, jewellery and bullion exceeding 3.5 kg, a significant amount of foreign currency and detection of secret foreign bank accounts with deposits running into crores of rupees,” a release from the Director General of the IT department, Karnataka and Goa Region, stated.
"The searches at the five medical diagnostic centres resulted in establishing the various methods whereby doctors are paid for referring medical tests," the report states.
"The payment of referral fees to doctors is found to be made in four different ways - Cash payments made on a fortnightly basis, advance in cash paid to doctors as a kind of imprest cash from which the actual referral fees payable is adjusted, and the advance is again recouped on a fortnightly basis.
"In some cases, referral fees paid to doctors in cheque is disguised and shown in books as professional fees. In this kind of cases, an agreement with doctors is made by which they are taken as in-house consultants. However, they neither come to diagnostic centres nor see the patients or write reports. This payment is a disguised referral fee. The other mode of payment was some revenue sharing agreements with some doctors by which referral fee is paid in cheques," the release added.
Doctors particular
About ‘dues’: "Some of the labs employ commission agents whose job is to distribute money to doctors in envelopes. These agents insert a small chit, which has details like name of the patient, tests done, amounts billed against the tests, and cuts/commission amount to be given to the doctor and the date on which the test was done, in the envelopes. It is seen that the doctors are very particular about the amounts. Where they don't get their 'due', they return the envelopes and the dispute is later settled with the labs," an official said.
