Second Great Falls Addiction Counselor Charged With Medicaid Fraud

A licensed addiction counselor in Great Falls, Montana, has been charged with two felony counts of Medicaid fraud, along with felony counts of filing a false claim to a public agency and tampering with or fabricating evidence, in a case that investigators built from a former client's complaint and her explanation-of-benefits statement.

Carlos Malaver Parada owns and operates CMP Power of Healing Counseling and Treatment Center, described in charging documents as a mental health center and chemical dependency clinic. The clinic became a Medicaid facility in April 2023 and Parada became an individually enrolled Medicaid provider that July, according to the court file. If convicted on the fraud counts, the maximum penalty is a fine of up to $50,000 or ten times the value of the payments obtained, up to ten years in prison, or both.

The case is the second criminal Medicaid fraud prosecution against a Great Falls addiction treatment operator in four months. In July, the state charged Victoria Davenport, 60, who owned the Gyst House, Gyst House 2 and Enlightening Minds, with two felony counts of Medicaid fraud, two counts of false claims to a public agency and a count of tampering with evidence; court documents in that case allege she submitted claims totaling $2,300,729.65 and received $1,243,131.17 in fraudulent reimbursements.

How the cases were found

Both prosecutions began outside the treatment industry: in data. The Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services runs a Surveillance Utilization Review Section that queries Medicaid claims to find providers billing far more than their peers for behavioral health services, and the section flagged Davenport as a billing outlier. Court documents in her case state she billed an average of 13 hours per day; the state treats consistent billing of more than nine hours a day as an indicator that a provider is billing excessively or billing for the work of unlicensed staff.

The Parada case followed a different route to the same unit. In May 2025, the Montana Medicaid Fraud Hotline received a complaint from a woman who said she had started seeing Parada in December 2023 for chemical dependency and mental health services while she needed intensive outpatient care to stay compliant with her probation. She said she attended three or four appointments, then found through an explanation of benefits in the spring of 2024 that the clinic was still billing for sessions she never attended. She did not act on it at the time, she told investigators, because she was actively using drugs. After entering inpatient treatment in April 2025, she reported the billings to the hotline and to the state behavioral health licensing board.

Investigators pulled Parada's Medicaid claims from January 2023 through June 2025 and later extended the review to July 2026, identified nine recipients for closer examination and served an investigative subpoena on Parada in January 2026. For the original complainant, they counted 168 reimbursed claims for individual, family and group therapy between December 2023 and April 2025 — 164 more than she had attended — totaling $14,329.54 in fraudulent reimbursement.

Three more clients produced similar arithmetic. A man who began counseling in December 2024 had 169 claims submitted on his behalf; after one legitimate claim and four unpaid ones were removed, 164 claims totaling $3,086.08 remained. Another client who said she attended a single group session was tied to 191 claims the state determined fraudulent, totaling $3,597.67, plus two individual-session claims of $208.68. A client the original complainant referred had 198 fraudulent claims from October 2024 through May 2025 totaling $15,367.31. Across three clients, the complaint counts $21,221.97.

The referral arrangement at the center of the case

The charging documents also describe how new clients arrived. The initial complainant told investigators that Parada paid her $30 per client she referred, and that she received $30 to $60 per referral depending on its length. She said he also paid her for office work — translating, taking notes during appointments, data entry — and covered her phone bill, which investigators quote her describing as a bribe. The arrangement is the kind of detail that connects this case to the Davenport prosecution, where former employees told state licensing investigators that non-licensed staff completed notes that Davenport signed and that billing covered services not performed. In behavioral health, a claim rests on a treatment note rather than a procedure that can be documented independently, which is why both the referral payments and the missing sessions sit at the center of the state's case.

Parada's clinic has also sought public money beyond Medicaid. In May he requested funds from Cascade County's alcohol tax allocation, which the state distributes for chemical dependency services, and appears on an April 2026 state list of providers eligible to receive it. County commissioners did not approve funding for the clinic.

Why fraud cases matter to treatment capacity

Montana's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, established in 1995 inside the state Department of Justice, receives 75 percent of its funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — $939,984 in the current fiscal year — with the remaining $313,325 paid by the state. The unit handles both fraud and patient abuse or neglect in Medicaid-funded care, which means the dollars recovered in cases like these are the same federal-state dollars that pay for substance use disorder treatment in a state where treatment slots are limited.

The attorney general's office said the investigation behind the Davenport charges was part of a White House task force on fraud. Both cases remain pending, and neither defendant has been convicted. For patients, the practical lesson in the charging documents is a small one worth repeating: an explanation of benefits is a billing record, not a receipt, and reading it is how the state's own investigation started. Anyone who suspects fraud in a Medicaid-funded treatment program can report it to a state Medicaid fraud hotline, and anyone looking for care can find medication-assisted treatment and outpatient programs through the treatment directory.