Crown seeks jail for forging urine tests

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This article was published 03/02/2020 (2217 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Entrusted to test truck drivers for drug and alcohol use, Colleen Robinson instead forged the results of more than 400 urine tests as her company, Precision Health Ltd., fell into financial ruin, a Winnipeg court has been told.

“I never put anyone on the road who failed a test,” Robinson told provincial court Judge Lee Ann Martin at a sentencing hearing last week. “I am however aware that my actions betrayed my customers… I acknowledge the rules are there for a reason.”

Robinson, 55, pleaded guilty to one count of uttering forged documents in connection to hundreds of test results her company falsified from May 2017 to September 2018.

Court was told Robinson’s company was enlisted by the U.S. Department of Transportation to co-ordinate drug testing for local truck drivers who wanted to deliver goods across the border. Precision Health received urine samples from prospective drivers, which were then sent to a U.S. testing facility for analysis before landing at a Barrie, Ont., lab, where the results were “interpreted” by a medical review officer, Crown attorney Peter Edgett told court. If the results were negative for drugs, the medical review officer would forward a certificate to Precision Health or the appropriate trucking company.

Robinson charged just $80 for each drug test and soon found herself unable to pay her expenses and overhead, Edgett said.

“She had a lot of costs and there was very little left over for her to keep the business going and that seems to have been what played into what transpired here,” Edgett said.

Soon, the U.S. testing facility and Ontario lab cut off their services because she hadn’t paid her bills.

Robinson’s immediate solution was to forge certificates from the medical review officer, which she then provided as genuine to her customers.

“She was still taking urine samples from her customers, taking the money from the customers, and (not) following the regimented process,” Edgett said.

Then Robinson, a former nurse, and one of her employees came up with another idea: rather than do nothing, they would test the urine samples themselves, using a “cup test” that provided only pass/fail results.

Precision Health continued to issue forged medical review officer certificates while administrators at the Barrie lab, suspicious that the company had continued to accept and test urine samples, contacted police. Police executed a search at Precision Health on Sept. 6, 2018, and arrested Robinson.

While Robinson’s actions were not motivated by greed, but by a desire to keep her business afloat, she put drivers at risk on both sides of the border, said Edgett, who recommended Robinson be sentenced to one year in jail.

“Instead of dealing with the situation head on, the accused simply put her head in the sand and kept going,” Edgett said. “I accept she didn’t maliciously want anything to happen, however she was burying her head to the risk she was creating.”

Defence lawyer Saul Simmonds recommended Robinson be allowed to serve a conditional sentence in the community, arguing she never processed a certificate for anyone who failed her in-house testing.

“The intent wasn’t to screw over the trucking companies” he said. “If someone tested positive, she would never have put through a negative report in those circumstances.”

Martin reserved her decision and will sentence Robinson at a later date.

Robinson was convicted of fraud in 2011. Court heard Precision Health had been contracted to provide medical tests and physicals for prospective CN Rail employees, but instead of having a doctor conduct the examinations and tests, as required, they were completed by Robinson or another nurse.

“The paperwork would be signed off as if a doctor had been seeing these people,” Edgett said.

Robinson was fined $14,000 and sentenced to two years of probation in that case.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca