Search warrants unsealed in New Hampshire detail a Justice Department fraud investigation into the autism therapy company. Barnett strenuously denies the allegations.
Key Takeaways
- A federal criminal investigation into ABA Centers of America and its Founder has been under way since at least February 2025. A search warrant affidavit unsealed on July 6, 2026 identifies six target offenses, among them health care fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. No charges have been filed.
- Temple University terminated a $55 million gift and accepted Christopher Barnett’s resignation from its Board of Trustees on September 8. The university said it learned of the allegations only in recent days, through the unsealed court records. The commitment was the largest in Temple’s history.
- The affidavit places billing across Barnett’s ABA companies above $2.4 billion, with reimbursements above $480 million. It quotes internal emails describing a patient classification system keyed to insurance reimbursement rates. These are the government’s assertions of probable cause, not findings of fact.
- Two courts have separately allowed payer fraud claims against the company to proceed. A Massachusetts judge denied all but one count of a motion to dismiss in April, and a federal judge in Florida did substantially the same in August. Barnett intends to defend the allegations vigorously.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Chair of Temple University’s Board of Trustees and its President wrote to students and staff to explain why the largest philanthropic commitment in the university’s history was being unwound. Christopher M. Barnett, a 2010 graduate and the Founder of the Fort Lauderdale autism therapy company ABA Centers of America, had resigned from the board. The $55 million he had pledged the previous October, which was to have put his name on the College of Public Health, would not be coming.
The letter is careful and brief. It says Barnett is recovering from a life-threatening medical event. It says he and his company face serious allegations, which he strenuously denies and intends to defend vigorously. It says the university learned of those allegations in recent days, and that Barnett cooperated. It does not say what the allegations are.
They are in a court file in Concord, New Hampshire, which had been publicly available for eight weeks before anyone appeared to read it.
A Sealed Docket in Concord, and What It Contained
On the last day of 2025, a Special Agent with the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services filed an eighty-page affidavit in the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire. It asked a Magistrate Judge for permission to search twenty-five email accounts belonging to the people who ran ABA Centers of America and its affiliated entities, ICBD Holdings and Exact Billing Solutions.
The warrant issued the same day. The docket was sealed. The court unsealed it on July 6, 2026, and the file sat open on PACER through the summer without attracting notice, until an independent reporter working the docket published from it earlier this month.
What the file contains is not a verdict or a charge. A search warrant affidavit is a sworn statement of probable cause: one agent’s account of why there is reason to believe evidence of a crime will be found somewhere. It is written by one side, tested against a standard far below the one a jury applies, and answered by no one. Everyone it names is presumed innocent, and no one has been charged. Acuity is reporting it because it is a public court record, and because it establishes something the civil litigation against the company had only circled: that a federal criminal investigation exists, that it has been running for more than a year and a half, and that it has moved from witness interviews to the subjects’ own documents.
Six Target Offenses, From Billing to Laundering
The affidavit lists six federal offenses under investigation. Three describe the taking: false statements relating to health care matters under 18 U.S.C. Section 1035, wire fraud under Section 1343, and health care fraud under Section 1347. One describes the agreement: conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud under Section 1349. Two describe what allegedly happened to the money afterward: conspiracy to commit money laundering under Section 1956(h), and transacting in criminal proceeds under Section 1957.
The agent writes that the investigation concerns billing federal and private health care benefit programs for medically unnecessary services, creating false records to justify higher reimbursement, including by misrepresenting where care was delivered, and requiring clinicians to drop their insurance credentials so their work could be billed at higher out of network rates.
The prosecutors named on the filings are Trial Attorneys with the Fraud Section of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in Washington, working with the United States Attorney’s Office in New Hampshire. The Fraud Section handles national health care fraud matters, which suggests a scope beyond one district.
The December warrant was not the first. The affidavit refers throughout to emails already obtained from Barnett’s accounts under an earlier warrant, sworn in February 2025. That first docket does not appear on PACER and is presumably still sealed. The government, in other words, spent most of 2025 reading one man’s email, then returned to the same court for twenty-four more accounts belonging to thirteen other people, with the second application built substantially on what the first produced.
The Census Tracker and the Super Payor Threshold
The document’s most specific material concerns a system the affidavit calls the Census Tracker, built by the organization’s Chief Technical Officer, which sorted current patients into categories based on what their insurance reimbursed. In a January 2022 email quoted in the affidavit, the Chief Technical Officer sent Barnett what he described as a preview of the Super Payors, noting that he still needed to add each patient’s home office and that he would rename a field measuring percentage paid to something like Collection Rate. Barnett replied in the same thread: “Let’s change the definition of superpayors to 40% that’s more appropriate.”
Patient tiering is not a new allegation here. Point32Health’s Massachusetts counterclaim described super payer and scholarship payer tiers last November. What the affidavit adds is the mechanism, the software, and the threshold, set by the Founder at a number he chose.
The affidavit also quotes an exchange about a prospective client. A regional executive reported that an assessment had been completed, that the clinical team had concluded the child was not appropriate for the company’s care, that the child was exhibiting self injurious behaviors, and that a residential program had been recommended. The executive then noted that the family’s insurance paid in full under a self funded Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts plan. Barnett’s reply, quoted in full in the affidavit, was four words: “GET THIS CLIENT PLEASE.” The Director of Admissions then asked what promises he could make to the child’s mother.
Place of Service: Massachusetts Care Billed Through New Hampshire
A separate section addresses geography. A witness described in the affidavit told investigators that the company assigned Massachusetts patients insured through Blue Cross Blue Shield to clinics in New Hampshire and billed their services as though they had been delivered there, because New Hampshire plans reimbursed at higher rates. The witness said this was widely understood internally, that it came as a directive from Barnett, and that he built a map plotting patients against clinic locations.
Place of service misrepresentation is the one allegation that recurs across every proceeding against the company. It appears in the Point32Health counterclaim, in the Publix federal complaint, and now in the criminal affidavit. It is also the most portable lesson in the document for anyone else in this field: a coding practice that can look like an administrative convenience in an operations meeting and read, years later, as evidence of wire fraud.
The Numbers, and What They Do and Do Not Mean
The affidavit compiles claims data from seven private insurers and states that ABA Centers of America billed approximately $1.57 billion and was paid approximately $370 million. Counting Barnett’s other ABA entities, including operations in Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia, it puts total billing above $2.4 billion and reimbursement above $480 million.
The gap between those two figures is the whole argument. The government reads it as the signature of inflated charges never meant to be collected. The company has consistently read it as evidence of payers refusing to pay for authorized care.
The affidavit further alleges that proceeds funded personal purchases, including a Bombardier BD-700-1A10 aircraft acquired in November 2024 for $9.95 million through one of Barnett’s leasing entities, and the lease of a Fort Lauderdale waterfront home valued at close to $20 million.
Two Civil Rulings, Five Months Apart
The criminal investigation has run underneath a civil docket that has turned against the company twice this year.
On April 14, 2026, Justice Jackie Cowin of the Massachusetts Superior Court denied ABA Centers of America’s motion to dismiss the amended counterclaim brought by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Tufts Associated Health Maintenance Organization, and Health Plans, Inc., allowing every count to proceed except a declaratory judgment claim she found superfluous. Her order is pointed. The company’s contention that it did not know what the insurers claimed it had done wrong was, she wrote, baffling. The ruling has been on the docket since April and has not previously been reported.
On August 28, United States District Judge Raag Singhal reached a similar result in Fort Lauderdale, denying most of the company’s motion to dismiss Publix Super Markets’ racketeering complaint while dismissing three counts without prejudice. His order opens by describing the matter as a civil case that could also be brought as a criminal action, notes that the court has not been advised whether a concurrent criminal case is pending, and observes in a footnote that the conduct alleged would implicate the federal wire fraud statute and Florida’s insurance fraud statute. It concludes that, as the plaintiffs have alleged the facts, the defendants have engaged in criminal conduct.
Singhal did not have the New Hampshire affidavit before him. His question about a concurrent criminal case had an answer, filed in a sealed docket in Concord seven months earlier.
What Barnett and the Company Say
Barnett strenuously denies the allegations and intends to defend them vigorously, according to Temple’s letter. He has not been charged with any crime.
ABA Centers of America has denied wrongdoing consistently and in detail. In its Florida briefing, the company argues that the case is not about fraud but about a payer trying to avoid paying for medically necessary therapy for children with autism, and states that it continued treating children for more than a year without payment. It notes that it seeks medical necessity pre-approval before providing services, and that in many markets it has eliminated waiting lists that can otherwise run six months to two years.
The company has also won on points. Singhal dismissed the consumer protection count precisely because the families involved benefited from the arrangement rather than being harmed by it, and dismissed the ERISA and declaratory judgment counts as well. Cowin dismissed the declaratory judgment count in Massachusetts. The company’s public position has long been that its growth reflects operational execution rather than outside capital, a claim that distinguishes it from the private equity consolidation reshaping much of the rest of the industry.
The strain has nonetheless been visible. The company began discharging clients covered by Optum in June, then reduced staff and closed centers over the summer.
What Happens Next
Nothing in the unsealed file indicates whether charges will follow. Search warrants are investigative tools, not accusations, and many investigations that produce them end without an indictment. The nondisclosure order attached to the December warrant, which bars Microsoft from notifying the account holders, runs until December 30, 2026 or 30 days after the investigation concludes, whichever comes first. That is a ceiling the government requested, not a schedule it committed to.
What is on the public record is narrower and firmer than the conversation now moving through the field. Federal investigators have been examining ABA Centers of America and its affiliated entities since at least February 2025. They have obtained the email of the people who ran it. Two judges have found that payers’ fraud allegations are substantial enough to try. And a major university, on five days’ notice, unwound the largest gift it had ever been promised. The story reached the field this month through independent reporting on Substack rather than through any court announcement, which is its own comment on how thinly this sector is covered.
For the providers and operators watching, the practical content of the affidavit is not the aircraft or the dollar totals. It is the ordinary machinery: a spreadsheet that ranked children by reimbursement, a map that decided which clinic a patient was billed through, and a credentialing policy written to keep clinicians out of network. Those are decisions made in operations meetings, and the document is a record of how they can read to a federal agent years later.
Acuity has requested comment from ABA Centers of America, the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of New Hampshire, and the Department of Justice. Temple University’s statement was issued publicly on September 8. This is a developing story.
No individual named in the search warrant affidavit has been charged with a crime. All are presumed innocent.
