Tax investigators raid cardiologists suspected of taking payments from device suppliers
The FIOD searched 8 homes and offices on Thursday. Cardiologists are suspected of taking payments from medical device suppliers for years, routed through holding companies and research entities, in return for their hospitals buying those products.
Image: Joep van Rheenen / FIOD. The FIOD’s Team Bijzondere Bijstand, the armed unit that secures searches so investigators and forensic staff can work safely.
Tax investigators searched 8 homes and business premises on Thursday in a criminal investigation into cardiologists who are suspected of taking payments from the companies whose devices they put into patients.
The searches were carried out by the FIOD, the criminal investigation arm of the Dutch tax administration, in the provinces of Noord-Holland and Gelderland. Physical and digital records were seized, along with assets. Demands for information were served on several parties involved. Nobody was arrested.
What the investigators think happened
The suspicion is that cardiologists received payments for years from suppliers of medical devices, and that in return those suppliers got preferential treatment when the 2 hospitals where the doctors worked decided what to buy.
The money is thought to have reached the doctors through a set of structures rather than directly: personal holding companies, the partnerships through which Dutch medical specialists often organise themselves, and legal entities set up for research.
On paper the payments had respectable labels. They were booked as fees for advisory work, as contributions to scientific research, or as sponsorship, including the sponsorship of fellows. Investigators suspect the money was not, or not fully, spent on any of that, and that a large part of it ended up benefiting the doctors themselves.
Neither the hospitals nor the suppliers have been named. The investigation is being led by the Functioneel Parket, the specialist fraud and environment division of the public prosecution service.
Why it started
The case did not begin with a routine audit. It began with people inside the medical world who decided to say something, and with press reporting. The FIOD lists both as the trigger: tip-offs from within the sector, and media coverage.
The service is blunt about why it treats this as more than an accounting problem. “Corruption and undesirable financial relationships between medical specialists and the medical industry can damage patients’ trust in healthcare,” it said. “Patients must be able to trust that a medical specialist makes the right decision for their health and is not influenced by the medical industry, or by rewards from it.”
Not the first time
There were earlier criminal investigations into suspected bribery in the medical sector in 2018 and in 2022. Journalists have examined the transparency of money flowing between industry and doctors, and the Health and Youth Care Inspectorate has looked at gunstbetoon, the Dutch term for inducements offered by suppliers to the people who prescribe or select their products.
Hospitals have run their own internal reviews and the rules have been tightened. The FIOD says it is still receiving signals about money flows that may point to conflicts of interest, improper inducements or outright bribery.
Its response is to keep investigating and, at the same time, to start talking. The service says it will hold conversations with hospitals and medical specialists to go through concrete signals and raise awareness of the risks in these money flows and structures, with the aim of improving the integrity and transparency of financing in the sector and of the research being done in it.
Anyone who knows of similar arrangements in the medical sector can contact the FIOD at [email protected]. People who want to speak to the service on condition that their name and their company’s name stay out of any criminal file can call its Team Criminele Inlichtingen on 088 155 16 61, which is staffed 24 hours a day.
