Exclusive | NY’s fraudulent CDPAP program lost $1.2 billion to scammers and mismanagement

Taking advantage of a generous New York state program to aid his ailing mother, Ballal Hossain signed up a dozen family members to work as her caregivers.

Over six years, they were paid $348,000 to look after the elderly woman at a Manhattan apartment.

Except the mom was in Bangladesh the entire time.

Incredibly, Hossain got away with the fraud by having his brother pose as their sick mother for whenever inspectors showed up, before finally being caught. He was later sentenced for grand larceny, according to prosecutors.

It’s just one egregious example of a welfare program — called the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, or CDPAP — that has cost New York taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars to waste and fraud.

First set up in 1994, CDPAP was intended to alleviate the number of elderly people going to nursing homes.

But with no qualifications or medical certifications required to enroll as a carer in CDPAP, the program metastasized with little oversight.

The Post was able to identify at least $179 million stolen by CDPAP recipients over the last 10 years, while the program wasted at least $1 billion of taxpayer cash on middlemen.

“Because you are in people’s homes, it’s hard to see what’s going on, and vulnerable people can’t stop someone from committing fraud on their behalf,” Bill Hammond, Senior Fellow for Health Policy at the Empire Center for Public Policy, a non-partisan think tank in Albany, told The Post.

Costs for the program itself have more than quadrupled.

In 2019, CDPAP spending was $2.5 billion, but by 2023 the program accounted for $9.1 billion of Medicaid spending in New York state, with 250,000 people enrolled to receive treatment and 400,000 caregivers — “Personal Assistants” in CDPAP parlance.

The state Department of Health admitted to The Post for this story that the program has led to a “fiscal crisis.”

Even Gov. Kathy Hochul herself called it out, saying it was “one of the most abused programs in the history of New York,” in 2024, and adding, “something has to give.”

By that time, she had made promises of reform and took action to consolidate CDPAP, but the program only expanded, now serving more than 280,000 patients — with costs continuing to climb.

Annual spending by New York State on CDPAP skyrocketed to $12 billion in 2025, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“I was always worried about the high growth, and that people would be taking advantage of a program that was not tightly controlled,” said Hammond, who has closely followed the program for years.

And that’s exactly what happened in three cases prosecuted in the last six years.

Zakia Khan pleaded guilty to “a sweeping scheme” to bilk Medicaid out of $68 million in 2025. She was the owner of two Brooklyn-based adult daycare centers, who paid kickbacks and bribes to patients for services they billed for but were never provided between 2017 and 2024, according to the Department of Justice.

Khan and co-conspirators then laundered the cash through other entities they controlled, according to court documents.

In 2023 another Brooklyn-based healthcare CEO, Marianna Levin, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for defrauding Medicaid out of $100 million for home health care workers, court documents say.

Between 2015 and December 2020, Medicaid reimbursed agencies Levin controlled which claimed to provide personal care to residents living in New York City and Nassau County.

A significant portion of the billings were fraudulent, according to the DOJ.

In 2019, Farrah Rubani, the CEO of Hopeton Care in Brooklyn, was indicted by the New York Attorney General for allegedly embezzling $11 million.

Authorities claimed she use the company to fleece the state health program by submitting false claims. Rubani and her police officer husband were also accused of using the cash to buy a $250,000 Bentley and a lavish vacation home. Her husband was not charged with wrongdoing.

As a result of the investigation, the Attorney General froze Medicaid payments to Hopeton and all of Rubani’s assets.

Rubani — who at the time of her indictment denied the charges through her lawyer — was never criminally convicted, but agreed to pay $148,000 damages, according to 2025 court documents.

A LinkedIn account under Rubani’s name suggests she still works in the industry as senior vice president of home health service Extended Home Care. She could not be reached and a lawyer who represented her did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.

At the in-home level, carers — who, as of 2026, are paid between $18.65 and $20.65 per hour — have been caught taking advantage of the system, sources confirmed.

They have been known to send bills claiming care for people while they were hospitalized or after they had passed away, or for treating two people at the same time, even though they were in different places.

A healthcare source told The Post: “We’ve identified several examples of personal assistants manipulating the system to work 23-hour days for family members, with projected annual earnings of around $200,000.”

“Facilitators” are also a huge problem.

In 2024, New York State Attorney General Letitia James and the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York announced a settlement agreement with two Brooklyn-based home care agencies that worked as “fiscal intermediaries” — the technical term for middlemen.

Edison Home Health Care and Preferred Home Healthcare settled for more than $17 million for defrauding Medicaid and underpaying more than 25,000 home health aides.

By the time Hochul started reform in 2023, the state was paying middlemen from more than 600 companies, with costs reaching between $500 million and $1 billion that year alone, according to sources.

Some of the companies were charging an eye-watering $1,000-a-month per person they represented, The Post can reveal, but doing little more than running the payroll.

“There were no standards for who could do it, no certification,” said Hammond, referring to the middlemen. “Anyone could set up one of these companies.”

Showing just how bloated those charges were, sources who have looked into them told The Post the same work is now being done for over 93% less, at charges of $68.50 per person, per month.

In response to the fraud and overspending, New York State replaced all companies acting as middlemen with a single company, Georgia-based Public Partnerships, LLC (PPL).

However, transferring to that system has been beset by problems, hit with lawsuits by the companies who have been cut out, and took until April 2025 to finally put in place.

New York State Department of Health said they have already made significant savings and believe unifying the system under PPL will result in lower costs.

“New York State took significant steps to reverse the CDPAP fiscal crisis by reining in administrative costs and establishing systems to eliminate opportunities for waste, fraud and abuse,” a spokesperson told The Post.

“Fraudsters fought tooth and nail for over a decade to keep [the old] broken system in place – but those days are over because we shut them down.

“The State Department of Health …  [cut] out hundreds of middlemen – saving $1 billion for taxpayers over the past year and protecting home care for people who actually need it.” 

Sources also pointed to what they called a “$10 million dark money campaign” which was allegedly set up in an attempt to block CDPAP reforms. 

The Medicaid Inspector General said it has identified more than $3.5 million dollars in CDPAP overpayments between 2019 and 2024, which have since been recovered.

A spokesperson for PPL echoed the Department of Health statement, saying their mandate was solely to “protect Medicaid dollars.”

“We have delivered meaningful accountability and long-term stability for CDPAP . . . ensuring this critical program remains viable for years to come.”