A podiatrist from Tustin, who in February was found guilty of billing insurance companies for medical services that were never actually performed, was sentenced to nearly a year in prison.

42 year old Renae Louise Witt is scheduled to report to the Orange County Jail on June 17, after being convicted of seven felony counts of filing a fraudulent claim for a health benefit. She was sentenced to 364 days in jail, two years formal probation and ordered to pay restitution to the insurance companies.

A judge has rejected her request to extend her jail surrender date.

Witt also faces a 10-year suspension of her medical license.

Between 2015 and 2017, while working as a doctor of podiatric medicine at the Tustin Place Medical Group, Witt billed two insurance companies for $174,395 for podiatrist appointments that never happened and for medical services that were never performed for six different patients. The insurance companies paid out $75,861.52 for these fraudulent claims.

One of the patients was not even in the country on some of the dates that Witt billed appointments on her behalf.

When Anthem Blue Cross began investigating patient complaints about the billings, Witt provided fabricated medical records to try to justify the fraudulent billings.

Prosecutors say she moved to Oregon on Nov. 6 2017 and was living in La Pine, Oregon, when she was was arrested on Jan. 19, 2018 by deputies from the Deschutes County (Oregon) Sheriff’s Department, and then.extradited after being charged on Jan. 16 2018 with seven felony counts of insurance fraud with sentencing enhancements for aggravated white collar crime over $100,000 and loss of over $65,000,

“Doctors are entrusted with the most serious of responsibilities to maintain and restore human health,” said Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer.

“Instead this doctor violated that position of trust and used her unsuspecting patients as a revenue stream by bilking insurance companies out of tens of thousands of dollars for work she never performed. The Orange County District Attorney’s Office is committed to protecting patients from unscrupulous doctors and protecting insurance companies from being defrauded. Holding bad actors accountable prevents insurance rates from being increased and keeps costs down for patients.”

Deputy District Attorney Steven Bunn of the Insurance Fraud Unit prosecuted this case.