WASHINGTON — A North Carolina man pleaded guilty Wednesday to defrauding Medicare out of $60 million through a kickback scheme involving bogus tests for COVID-19, flu and other viruses.

James Shuford Price III copped to filing a false tax return and paying off collectors of sham test specimens after pilfering funds from Medicare and the California Medical Assistance Program (Medi-Cal) to pay for the tests at his lab in the Golden State.

The 59-year-old Raleigh native faces up to 13 years in prison and a $500,000 fine when sentenced, along with three years of supervised release.

Price owned Los Angeles-based Golden Star Labs and submitted $11 million in false claims to Medicare and $85 million in false claims to Medi-Cal for SARS-CoV-2, Influenza A and B, and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) tests between August 2023 and June 2025.

Medicare and Medi-Cal responded by forking over more than $60 million to Golden Star. The FBI and US Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of North Carolina later seized $6 million in assets.

“Stealing taxpayer dollars that should be used to help legitimate beneficiaries is lowdown, dirty pool. We have a message to fraudsters who steal federal dollars: we will catch, prosecute, and imprison you. Cheaters. Never. Win,” said Eastern North Carolina US Attorney Ellis Boyle.

Price worked with so-called “collectors” in California and other states who were paid more than $17 million to supply samples between August 2023 and January 2025.

The collectors committed “widespread identity theft” — including of out-of-state physicians — to obtain the specimans, according to prosecutors.

For example, upwards of 90% of the claims Price submitted from his lab to Medi-Cal used fake test requests based on stolen personal information from five clinicians.

Each had seemingly signed phony contracts with Price’s GSL lab to hand over the samples for a fixed fee.

“These fake contracts were meant to give the false appearance that GSL was complying with the law,” the Department of Justice noted in a press release.

“However, the same kickback scheme with GSL paying collectors on a per-specimen basis to induce referrals continued without regard to these phony contracts, resulting in millions of dollars in Medi-Cal/Medicare payouts to GSL.”

In 2022, Price also filed a false federal income tax return based on income he received — to which he also pleaded guilty.