A radiologist once employed at Johns Hopkins University has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison on four counts of mail fraud for submitting false travel expense reports to the university. Dr. Jean-Francois (Jeff) Geschwind will also serve three years of supervised release as a result of the plea agreement.
In a September 27 press release, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland detailed the accusations levied against Geschwind, who worked at Johns Hopkins as a physician in the department of vascular and interventional radiology from 1998 to 2015. Geschwind left Johns Hopkins in 2015 to lead the department of radiology and biomedical imaging at Yale University, a position he no longer holds.
According to the plea agreement reached with federal authorities, Geschwind "made material misrepresentations and omissions in travel expense statements" that he submitted to Johns Hopkins "for the purpose of obtaining travel expense reimbursements to which he was not entitled." These included travel expense statements for "purported business expenses" when he knew they were for personal expenses, such as family vacations and meals.
The U.S. attorney's office provided an example of a 13-day vacation Geschwind took to the U.K. and France in which he falsely represented that he traveled to the locations to give lectures in connection with his work for Johns Hopkins. The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine issued three separate checks that included reimbursement for his family vacation, according to authorities.
Geschwind also received reimbursement from Johns Hopkins for expenses that he knew would be paid later by a second or even third entity. Geschwind did not disclose to Johns Hopkins that he would be seeking additional reimbursements for the same expense, the press release states.
For example, in July 2015 Geschwind attended the Asia-Pacific Primary Liver Cancer Expert (APPLE) meeting in Japan. By this time he had joined Yale as the head of the university's department of radiology. He was subsequently issued checks from both Johns Hopkins and Yale for round-trip airfare to the meeting, and he was also compensated for the plane ticket by a life sciences company based in France. Geschwind therefore received three separate payments for the airfare, the authorities noted.
The U.S. attorney's office charged that Geschwind ultimately received payments of "hundreds of thousands of dollars" from Johns Hopkins. As part of the plea agreement, he agreed to pay $583,484.31 in restitution to Johns Hopkins, an amount he has paid in full.
Geschwind's actions were uncovered by investigators at Johns Hopkins' Office of Hopkins Internal Audit (OHIA), which turned the case over to federal authorities after discovering "he had requested and received significant sums of inappropriate payments."
Geschwind is a prominent interventional radiologist who began his training at the University of Paris before moving to the U.S. to complete his medical degree at Boston University. He specializes in hepatic cancer and has published hundreds of scientific articles and abstracts, as well as delivered keynote addresses at scientific meetings and symposia.
