Ticker: Father and son duo jailed in lottery scheme; Medicaid to audit high price drugs

A father and son from Watertown have both been sent to prison for running an elaborate lottery fraud scheme designed to enrich themselves and help prize winners avoid paying taxes on their windfall, prosecutors said.

Ali Jaafar, 63, and Yousef Jaafar, 29, both of Watertown, cashed in 14,000 winning lottery tickets over a roughly 10-year period, laundered more than $20 million in proceeds, and then lied on their tax returns to cheat the IRS out of about $6 million, the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston announced Monday.

The Jaafars purchased winning lottery tickets at a discount from people who wanted to avoid identification by the state lottery commission, which withholds taxes and outstanding child support payments from payouts.

Medicaid to audit high price drugs

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Tuesday it is planning to conduct a yearly audit to verify the prices drug makers charge on a handful of the costliest prescriptions covered by Medicaid.

Drugs that cost Medicaid the most money — some as much as $2 million per treatment — will be selected for the survey.

The proposal was prompted by rising drug prices and complaints from state leaders who say they are having trouble negotiating those costs with manufacturers, said Dan Tsai, director of Center for Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program Services.

“We’ve got very high cost drugs, who have no competition,” Tsai said Tuesday.

CMS doesn’t have the power to force drug companies to change how much they charge. But the administration hopes making more information about how drug companies arrive at their pricing publicly available will put political pressure on the drug companies.