In a story entitled Parents: Therapist cheated autistic children, The Advocate of Stamford Connecticut reports on alleged misrepresentation and bad billing from a local ABA provider.

The director of the program lists credentials as a masters and doctorate from NYU, and a BCBA certification. The parents are questioning this, asking for evidence. The school district is asking for proof of credentials.

This raises the obvious question (already asked by the parents): why didn’t the district check credentials before hiring this organization as a vendor to provide therapy?

The parents further allege, and claim to have the invoices and timesheets to prove it, that the agency was billing for times that no therapy was provided.

The agency is reported to be out of business.

It looks like a huge mess. It is easy to spin this as “ABA therapists are bad”. But, I don’t see it that way. There will always be people attempting fraud, pushing the boundaries in a bad way.

What I like to see here is the parents reporting the problems. It can be very difficult to complain about a therapy provider. A parent may not want to appear to be a troublemaker. In this case, they had numbers, but note that they still want to remain anonymous.

Some of the parents had used the same agency for private-pay therapy before the school district took over responsibility. The parents are upset that the School District didn’t ask for credentials–when some of the parents themselves didn’t either during their private-pay time.

Yes, the parents should have done this due-diligence and asked for credentials. At the same time, it is really hard to push a therapy provider like that when you are on a waiting list and don’t know if/when your child will start autism-specific therapies.

As I said, it’s a big mess. Nothing is yet proven, and there aren’t a lot of details available. But, as I noted above, I think if something like this happens, it’s good that the parents are reporting it. It is tough, but in order to keep credibility, parents need to do some checking and policing.

That all said, if this is true, and this business philosophy affected the therapy quality or quantity due the kids, much more should happen to the agency than just going out of business. Shorting a kid in need is beyond criminal.