The Bangor Daily News was the first to report this story. What you’re reading here would likely not be made public without the efforts of professional journalists asking questions, interviewing sources and obtaining documents.
A Maine immigrant health care provider has been quietly ensnared in a federal criminal case alleging a scheme that used Medicaid money to commit tax fraud.
The company, Lewiston-based Bright Future Healthier You, was the largest biller of MaineCare — the state’s version of Medicaid — for interpreting services in the last ten years. It surpassed that of Gateway Community Services, which the state halted MaineCare payments to last month while citing credible allegations of billing fraud around interpreting.
In February, the U.S. attorney’s office charged three people connected to the company for allegedly billing for interpreter services that didn’t happen, court documents show. The case is the first federal prosecution since an investigator authored a 2021 report outlining a suspicious billing pattern for interpreter services, especially among providers working with the state’s Somali community, that indicated widespread fraud within the MaineCare system.
This case has so far gained little attention in part because it is being prosecuted as tax fraud, not health care fraud. But it is similar to fraud schemes alleged in a massive wave of November prosecutions centered on Minnesota’s Somali community. Those cases reignited scrutiny of Gateway among Maine conservatives that dates back to the spring.
Bright Future remains an enrolled MaineCare provider and has only been cited once by the Maine Department of Health and Human Services for a violation nearly nine years ago, according to records obtained by the Bangor Daily News. The company has been paid $7.2 million in interpreting claims in the last 10 years.
The current federal case involves a late employee of Bright Future, her daughter, who owns an interpreting company, and a man who owns a different interpreting company. The federal government claims the three participated in a scheme that included billing MaineCare for interpreting services and then paying employees at the respective interpreting companies for those services, according to a February 2025 indictment.
Those employees didn’t exist, nor were the interpreting services actually rendered, according to federal court documents.
The late employee, Asmo Dol, died in June, just months after she was indicted in the scheme and had pleaded not guilty. The other two defendants, Rakiya Mohamed, Dol’s daughter, and Abdifitah Abdi, are specifically accused of filing fraudulent tax documents. They also pleaded not guilty, and their lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.
Abdihamid Hassan, the president of Bright Future, declined to comment through a lawyer. Nobody else at the company has been charged with a crime.
Since this is a federal tax case, a specific amount of money is not yet being sought but would be calculated as part of sentencing if Mohamed and Abdi are convicted, Sean Green, the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case, said. However, the indictment against the two points to specific dollar amounts.
For instance, in 2018, Mohamed reported on tax documents that Reliable Language Resources paid nearly $136,000 for “contract labor” for interpreting services, the indictment says. Between 2019 and 2022, Abdi filed multiple “false and fraudulent” individual income tax returns for independent contractors of his company, who provided interpreting services, for almost $87,000, all of which were false, according to the indictment.
“[I]n fact, as the defendants knew, no such payments were made and no such services were rendered,” the indictment said.
The case against Mohamed and Abdi strays from past work by federal prosecutors in the state. Although the pair were paid for interpreting services via MaineCare, they have not been charged with health care fraud. The U.S. attorney’s office has not prosecuted any health care fraud cases pertaining to interpreters in Maine since 2019.
“We make charging decisions based on the law and the evidence,” Green said. “And what we have in this case [is] the law and the evidence that we thought was sufficient to charge were the tax offenses.”
The state’s only citation against Bright Future came in in 2017. Maine DHHS’ program integrity unit found it had been overpaid by more than $414,000 the following year, according to a notice. A later review of the amount of money allegedly owed by the company to the state reduced that amount to nearly $204,000.
The department said the company failed to provide documentation required for interpreter reimbursement, instances where interpreter services were billed with no indication of those services actually being provided, and that the company was paying interpreters half of what the company submitted for reimbursement, the violation notice said.
Maine is one of 18 states in the country that provides direct reimbursement for language interpreters under Medicaid. The state pays $20 per 15 minutes for interpreting, according to the MaineCare manual. Interpreters don’t bill the state directly. Instead, a provider such as a doctor or mental health counselor bills MaineCare for services rendered, as well as interpreting. The provider then pays the interpreter, according to state regulations.
Reporting dating back to May from The Maine Wire, the media arm of the conservative Maine Policy Institute, led Republican lawmakers to call for more investigations and further scrutiny of the state’s payments via MaineCare for interpreting services.
Those calls have intensified in recent weeks following the state’s pause in payments to Gateway. On Thursday, Republicans on the Legislature’s Government Oversight Committee filed a request to investigate alleged fraud against MaineCare vendors.
Bangor Daily News investigative reporter Sawyer Loftus may be reached at sloftus@bangordailynews.com.