The record · Provo Canyon School / Universal Health Services
The Provo Canyon case, graded
Utah revoked both of Provo Canyon School’s licenses for abuse of children and ordered it closed. The public had paid the school $55.5 million. A federal integrity agreement was supposed to be watching, and a federal court had already seen this school once, in 1982. The record, the money, and the law it meets, walked element by element.
PUBLISHED AUG 15, 2026EVERY SOURCE HOSTED OR LINKEDGRADES APPLIED AS EVERYWHERE ON THIS SITE
ADJUDICATED Utah’s Office of Licensing revoked the Springville campus license on July 6, 2026 and the Provo campus license on July 17, 2026, ordering services terminated by August 6 and August 16. The company appealed both on July 27. There is no stay; the department states the appeal “has no bearing on the closure deadlines.”Source: Notices of Agency Action F22-93697 and F22-93696, hosted below as issued.
PRIMARY SOURCE The footage: two undercover videos published August 15, 2026, by a YouTuber whose investigations this site has reported on extensively and by a collaborator who worked about a month inside the school in late 2025. This site reports the footage as an attributed source and grades the public record independently of it.Source: the published videos, linked in full below.
CONFIRMED The federal frame: the school’s owner paid $122 million in 2020 to resolve federal false-claims allegations about its behavioral hospitals and signed a five-year Corporate Integrity Agreement with the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services. The conduct Utah documented in 2024 through 2026 ran inside that agreement’s window.Source: U.S. Department of Justice, July 10, 2020; the Corporate Integrity Agreement, hosted below.
ADJUDICATEDan agency or court put it on the recordPRIMARY SOURCEthe document, recording, or ledger itself, hosted or linkedADMITTEDthe company’s own words, sworn or self-publishedCONFIRMEDverified in the underlying official recordCORROBORATEDtwo independent sources say the same thingASSERTEDstated, with no second source yet; graded as exactly that
Forty-four years, and the last nine months
The long clock
1982
A federal appeals court affirms an injunction over practices at this school, including punitive isolation, and holds it a state actor for publicly placed youth. Milonas v. Williams.
2000
Universal Health Services buys the school.
JUL 2020
The $122 million federal false-claims settlement; the five-year Corporate Integrity Agreement begins.
2021–25
A compliance certification to the federal government every year. Public money keeps flowing, charted below.
MAR 2026
The integrity agreement ends.
The fast clock · the last nine months
DEC 2025
The undercover footage is recorded inside.
MAR 23
The state’s violence citations begin a cadence: March 23, May 18, July 17.
MAY 29
Emergency sanctions; admissions halted.
JUN 17
The 911 order: staff must be free to “bypass internal notification chains that delay medical care.”
JUL 6 & 17
Both licenses revoked.
JUL 27
Appeals filed. No stay; the closure dates stand.
AUG 15
The videos are published.
AUG 6 & 16
The campuses close.
What Utah found
Part 1 · The state record
ADJUDICATED Every quotation in this section is the State of Utah’s, from the revocation notices and the June order, hosted below as issued.
The state did not close Provo Canyon School for paperwork. The Provo revocation cites thirteen violations, on top of fifteen findings of noncompliance since March, including, in the department’s words:
“cruel and unnecessary practice on a child that included inducing pain compliance”
Notice of Agency Action F22-93696, July 17, 2026ADJUDICATED
Alongside it: “discipline or punishment that was intended to frighten or humiliate,” depriving children of “water, rest, and the opportunity for toileting,” withholding “personal interaction, emotional response, or stimulation,” violation of the right to be free from “retaliation for reporting,” and “withholding or manipulating information” from the department itself. The violence citations came in a cadence: March 23, May 18, and July 17, the third issued the day of the revocation.
The Springville notice, eleven days earlier, cites “chronic, ongoing noncompliance” and seventeen same-day citations: an “unnecessary restraint and aggressive physical contact with a client,” failure to report critical incidents within one day, staffing-ratio and supervision failures, and a set of background-screening violations: applications submitted late, the exclusion roster not checked monthly, staff not directly supervised while their clearances were pending.
In June, after an inspection found staff failed to summon emergency medical services for a child who had been rendered unconscious, calling a non-medical transport company instead, the department ordered the school to rewrite its policy so that staff may call 911 and, in the department’s words:
“bypass internal notification chains that delay medical care.”
June 17, 2026 Notice of Agency Action, conditionsADJUDICATED
A licensed residential treatment provider had to be ordered, by the state, to permit its staff to call an ambulance.
The sentence that explains the rest of the file
The Springville notice records what the school told the department about its restraint reports, and then records what the omissions did:
The provider “admitted to being hesitant to submit the restraint details in writing since those documents are public” and “preferred to provide the details verbally.” The result, in the department’s findings: “details were omitted, the severity of incidents recorded were minimized, and the Department was led to believe no investigation was necessary based on material facts being omitted.”
Notice of Agency Action F22-93697, July 6, 2026ADJUDICATED
That paragraph is the machine in one place: the school preferred the channel that leaves no record, and the state found the missing record steered it away from investigating. Most of this page is that sentence, met by the statutes that price it.
One more fact belongs here, for fairness in both directions. The department had been citing this school for years before it moved. Its licensing director described the philosophy: “We don’t go in with a hammer when a scalpel will do.” The decade of scalpels is part of this record too.
PRIMARY SOURCE The figures below are from Utah’s own vendor-payment ledger, Transparent Utah, queried August 15, 2026, for the school entity. The Orem hospital’s separate payments are excluded.Source: Transparent Utah vendor-payment records, fiscal 2011 through 2026.
Public money to Provo Canyon School, fiscal 2011–2026
$55,455,659
All public payers, total
State ledger, FY2011–FY2026
$32,053,754
Through Medicaid managed-care plans
Four county behavioral-health authorities
~$2.3–3.0M
Still flowing per year, through fiscal 2026
The years the state was documenting the abuse
~225
Licensed beds across the two campuses
At rates the school’s own paperwork puts near $950 a day and up privately, $49,400 due at admission
Paying channel
Total
Wasatch Behavioral Health (Medicaid prepaid mental-health plan)
$27,218,726
Central Utah Counseling Center (Medicaid PMHP)
$3,252,202
Southwest Behavioral Health Center (Medicaid PMHP)
$1,531,026
San Juan Mental Health (Medicaid PMHP)
$51,800
State of Utah (health and human services, child welfare, juvenile justice)
$23,401,905
Total to the school, all public payers
$55,455,659
For reference, excluded from every school figure on this page: the owner’s separate Orem hospital (Provo Canyon Behavioral), same ledger
$9,814,903
Who paid, year by year: the channel that never stopped
Every bar is the state’s own ledger. The blue and gray segments are the school entity only, and every dollar figure on this page counts only them. The teal segment is the owner’s separate Provo Canyon Behavioral hospital in Orem, $9.81 million more from the same ledger, shown so the two are never confused. Direct state placements fade to almost nothing after 2021; the school’s Medicaid channel pays through the revocation year.
The school is an enrolled Medicaid provider. Its active federal provider records carry the Psychiatric Residential Treatment Facility taxonomy for both campuses, a category that exists only inside Medicaid, and a separate registration under a foster-care agency taxonomy. The money confirms what the registrations say: four county Medicaid plans paid the school $32 million, and the state’s own umbrella, which includes child-welfare and juvenile-justice placements, paid $23.4 million more. Medicaid pays such facilities a per-diem on the condition, written into federal regulation, that the resident receives active treatment.
The owner’s annual report states the business model plainly. Its behavioral division booked $7.43 billion in 2025, 42 percent of it from Medicaid and 52 percent from government payers overall, and reports its performance in a metric of its own choosing:
“net revenue per adjusted patient day”
Universal Health Services Form 10-K, behavioral health segmentADMITTED
A bed filled is revenue earned, by the company’s own arithmetic. The two payers of that per-diem, parents on one side and the public on the other, were each shown a treatment program. What the footage and the state found on the floor is section 5, and what the gap between them meets in the statute books is section 6.
The 1982 injunction
Part 3 · A federal court saw this school first
ADJUDICATEDMilonas v. Williams, 691 F.2d 931 (10th Cir. 1982): a federal civil-rights class action brought by youths placed at Provo Canyon School. The Tenth Circuit affirmed an injunction against practices at the school, including punitive isolation, and held that the school, for youths placed by public agencies, acted under color of state law.Source: the published opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Two things follow from a forty-four-year-old case. First, the categories in the 2026 revocations are not new to this institution; a federal court enjoined practices in the same family at the same school before most of its current staff were born. Second, the 1982 holding is load-bearing law today: it is the case that makes the school a state actor for publicly placed children, which is the doorway to the constitutional claims in section 6. The court also held that parental consent does not by itself authorize limiting a child’s liberty without cause. The school’s present owner bought it in 2000 and states that it “cannot comment on the operations or patient experience” before that date. The 1982 injunction does not need the owner’s comment; it is a published federal opinion about this facility, and its state-action holding does not expire with a change of ownership.
The settlement and the monitor
Part 4 · The federal frame
CONFIRMED In July 2020, Universal Health Services and its behavioral subsidiaries paid $122 million to resolve federal and state false-claims allegations, and the company signed a five-year Corporate Integrity Agreement covering its behavioral health division. The agreement ran to March 2026. Both campuses of Provo Canyon School, as Medicaid psychiatric residential treatment facilities, sit inside its defined scope.Source: U.S. Department of Justice press release, July 10, 2020; the Corporate Integrity Agreement, hosted below, scope definitions at its opening sections.
The government’s description of what the $122 million resolved:
“knowingly submitted false claims for payment… for services that were not medically necessary”; admissions of ineligible patients; failures to discharge patients when hospitalization was no longer necessary; excessive lengths of stay.
U.S. Department of Justice, July 10, 2020, summarized; full release linked in sourcesCONFIRMED
The integrity agreement was the fix the government bought. Its own terms, from the hosted document:
An annual certification. Each behavioral facility’s chief executive was required to certify compliance annually, and the board to pass an annual resolution. The agreement prices a false certification at $50,000 each. The agreement ran five annual cycles while the conduct Utah later documented was running.
A patient-safety monitor. An outside monitor with access to facilities and records, whose reports are confidential and, by the agreement’s terms, shielded from use in litigation.
A claims reviewer the company retains and pays. The Independent Review Organization that audits the claims is, by the agreement’s own text, engaged and compensated by the company it audits.
An exclusion clause. A material breach, expressly including a violation “that has a material impact on the quality of patient care,” is an independent basis for excluding the breaching entity from federal health programs.
Set the two records side by side. The agreement’s window: July 2020 to March 2026. Utah’s documented-conduct window at this school: 2024 into 2026, ending in a double revocation for patient abuse. The state’s findings arrived while the certifications were being signed. The Inspector General’s public enforcement log also shows stipulated penalties paid by company subsidiaries in 2023 and 2024 for employing individuals ineligible to work in federal health programs, the same pattern class as the retained uncleared worker in section 5.
One more fact about this company and this body of law. The Supreme Court’s controlling case on implied false certification, Universal Health Services v. Escobar, arose from a facility owned by this company, on allegations of unlicensed and unsupervised staff. The leading precedent on billing for care that is not what it claims to be carries the owner’s own name.
CORROBORATED This section holds the company’s public statements, sworn filings, and recruiting copy against the recorded floor. Quotations from the footage are from the published videos; staff are not named.Sources: company statements of 2020–2021; filings in UHS of Provo Canyon, Inc. v. Bliss, D. Utah No. 2:24-cv-00163; the company’s careers site; the published December 2025 footage.
What the company said
“We eliminated the use of seclusion or isolation some time ago.”
Provo Canyon School public statement, 2021ADMITTED
“The infrequent use of medications to assist a patient in gaining control is within the standard of care.”
Provo Canyon School public statement, 2021ADMITTED
The school’s own website describes its milieu with a phrase worth keeping whole: at Provo Canyon, “everything is treatment.” That is the phrase that turns a locked unit, a restraint, or a seclusion room into a billable treatment day. It is the billing theory of the file, published as marketing.
What the company swore
In 2024 the company sued a prior undercover filmmaker, and to win a restraining order it had to describe its own facility under oath. Its filings state that patient forms track “risk factors like suicidal thoughts or sexual victimization”; that a stabilization unit exists for patients at “increased safety risk”; and, of the front-line staff position watching those children:
The position of mental health technician “does not require a specialized certificate or license.”
UHS of Provo Canyon v. Bliss, company filing, swornADMITTED
The company’s recruiting page says the same thing in its own voice: mental health technician, $17.00 to $20.00 an hour, high-school diploma or GED, minimum age 21, full paid training provided. The arithmetic beside it: $49,400 is due at admission, and $17 an hour is $35,360 a year. The deposit for one child is larger than the annual pay of the technician watching him.
What the floor said
PRIMARY SOURCE From the published December 2025 footage, staff unnamed.
A trainer, on the population: “almost all” of the girls are suicidal. On frequency: restraints run 250 to 300 a month. On method: injections, tranquilizers. On a floor restraint that a crisis team had clinically prohibited: “But we did.” A veteran of three decades, recalling the era the owner says it cannot speak to: “we were slamming kids all over the place,” and, of himself, that it was exciting. The state’s Office of Background Processing wrote to one new hire that, because of its findings, he was “not eligible to have direct access to children and/or vulnerable adults.” His supervisor’s recorded response: no one has talked about dismissing you. A staffer, on a child’s request to leave: not today. A trainer, on how long some children stay: five and six years. The certification test for CPR came with the answers provided. The pool in the marketing photos held no water. The ropes course had not run in decades. Schooling, on the floor the cameras saw, was phones and TikTok.
PRIMARY SOURCE One pairing from the record belongs side by side. New-hire training, as recorded in December, includes handling instructions for media and suspected undercover reporters, with suspicions escalated up the management chain. ADJUDICATED Seven months later, the department ordered the school to rewrite its policy so that staff could call 911 and bypass the internal chains that delay medical care. The school had an internal protocol for journalists. The state had to impose one for ambulances.Sources: the published December 2025 footage; the June 17, 2026 order, hosted above.
The state’s findings and the floor’s recordings did not coordinate; the infiltration ended in December, and the department’s violence citations and revocations ran March through July on the department’s own inspections. Two independent instruments returned the same reading. That is what CORROBORATED means on this page.
The homepage order
The Provo revocation carries a condition: within five business days, the school must post the notice of agency action “on the homepage of each of its websites,” where clients, guardians, and visitors can read it. As of August 15, 2026, the school’s homepage displays no such notice. The order to publish its own revocation is, so far, a condition observed nowhere the public can see. That status is a tripwire; if it changes, this line will change.
The law, element by element
Part 6 · The frameworks, graded
How to read this section: each entry takes one legal framework, lists the elements the statute itself requires, and under each element places the piece of the public record that answers it, graded. The grades measure the record behind an element; the burdens of proof and the defenses live in the fixed rows: who owns the lane, what honestly cuts against it, and the single document that would close it. What this section is not: charges, filings, or findings. No prosecutor has charged these offenses, no individual is accused of a crime here, and every person connected to the school is presumed innocent.
The state shelf: what a Utah prosecutor would look at
Aggravated child abuseUtah Code § 76-5-109.2
Record behind all 3 elements, most of it the state’s own
Element 1 · A serious injury to a child
ADJUDICATEDUtah’s statute enumerates what counts, and the list includes intracranial bleeding and fractured bone. The state’s June order documents a child at the Provo campus who suffered intracranial bleeding and a fractured jaw.
Element 2 · Inflicted, or permitted by a person with care or custody
ADJUDICATEDThe statute reaches those who “cause or permit” the injury; no personal blow is required. The state’s order describes staff who watched the assault escalate, and a response that called a transport van instead of 911.
PRIMARY SOURCEThe footage separately records the watch-first culture.
Element 3 · A culpable state of mind
ADJUDICATEDIntent, knowledge, or recklessness set the felony degree. The order records that warnings preceded the incident; the culture that produced it is on tape. A staffer’s 2025 class-A child-abuse plea in the state district court shows the charge family is live for conduct at this facility.
Who owns it
The Utah County Attorney. The injured child’s family holds the parallel civil claim.
Honestly against it
Utah privileges reasonable and necessary restraint. The privilege thins where the injury is serious and the state’s own findings call the practices cruel and unnecessary.
What would close it
The state has the video of the incident; its own order says so.
Child tortureUtah Code § 76-5-109.4, effective May 2025
Record behind all 3 elements; naming who ordered each confinement is the isolation logs’ job
Element 1 · Serious injury, inflicted or permitted
PRIMARY SOURCEUtah’s serious-injury list includes harm from prolonged deprivation and confinement, with qualifiers a prosecutor must prove. The footage describes a child held in solitary for two months after a runaway attempt, another for over a week, and day-plus isolation as intake routine.
Element 2 · Exceptionally cruel, or a course of conduct over a prolonged period
ADJUDICATEDThe state’s findings supply the character the statute asks about, in the state’s words: practices “intended to frighten or humiliate,” “pain compliance,” deprivation of water, rest, and toileting. Two months is a prolonged period on any reading a jury would be asked to make.
Element 3 · Intentionally or knowingly
CORROBORATEDThe knowledge is not thin, and it is not one source.
ADJUDICATEDThe state found the discipline was “intended to frighten or humiliate,” in those words.
PRIMARY SOURCEThe recordings show staff continuing a restraint a clinical team had prohibited, “But we did,” on a population a trainer describes as almost all suicidal.
ADMITTEDThe company announced in 2021 that it had eliminated seclusion, an admission of what the practice is worth, while the footage shows it running four years later.
ADJUDICATEDAnd the school preferred the orders unwritten because written records are public.
What the law still requires is narrower than an open question: the mental state must attach to the injury, not just the confinement, and to a named person, not a building. The attachment lives in the isolation logs.
Who owns it
The Utah County Attorney. First-degree felony; ten years to life.
Honestly against it
The statute has never been applied to a residential treatment facility, and a believed-therapeutic defense is live. It is not dormant law, though: Utah prosecutors charged it repeatedly in its first year, including for confinement-and-deprivation courses of conduct. What is untested is the institutional defendant, and this entry stays graded a reach.
What would close it
The isolation logs: durations, and who ordered them.
Communications fraudUtah Code § 76-6-525
Record behind all 3 elements, on paper the school wrote
Element 1 · A scheme to obtain money by misrepresentation or omission
PRIMARY SOURCEThe enrollment marketing promises a pool, a high-ropes course, daily activity, and contained school services, at roughly $950 a day and up, $49,400 due at admission. It was sent to strangers, identically, in writing.
Element 2 · The representation was false when made
PRIMARY SOURCEThe recorded floor: the pool empty and cracked for years, the ropes course idle for decades, schooling the cameras saw as phones and TikTok.
ADJUDICATEDThe state’s findings describe the same gap between the licensed program and the delivered one.
Element 3 · A communication in furtherance
PRIMARY SOURCEEach communication is a separate offense under the statute; reliance is not required; $5,000 makes it a second-degree felony, and a single week’s tuition clears that several times over.
Who owns it
The Utah County Attorney criminally; the Attorney General’s consumer-protection division civilly; paying parents individually under the Consumer Sales Practices Act, which also needs no reliance showing.
Honestly against it
Nothing material against the services-not-rendered core. Damages sort by family and by year.
What would close it
The enrollment packet beside the floor footage. Both already exist.
False or misleading information to a state agencyUtah Code §§ 76-8-506, 76-8-504
Record behind all 3 elements, found by the department itself
Element 1 · Information given to a government agency
ADJUDICATEDThe restraint reports the school delivered to its licensor, which the school preferred to deliver verbally “since those documents are public.”
Element 2 · False or misleading, including by omission
ADJUDICATEDThe department’s own finding does this element’s work: “details were omitted, the severity of incidents recorded were minimized.”
Element 3 · Bearing on a license, or to secure a benefit
ADJUDICATEDThe reports are license conditions, and the department found their effect: it “was led to believe no investigation was necessary.”
PRIMARY SOURCEThe footage adds a certification exam distributed with the answers provided.
Who owns it
The Utah County Attorney, on referral from the licensing department.
Honestly against it
This family of statutes is misdemeanor-grade; the exposure is small next to the rest of the page. Its weight is that the state has already found the deception as fact.
What would close it
Closed as a factual matter; it awaits only an office.
Entity criminal liability, and the pattern statuteUtah Code §§ 76-2-204; 76-17-401 et seq.
Record behind all 3 rows; the predicates are the fraud entries, not the abuse
Element 1 · An offense by an agent of the corporation
ADJUDICATEDThe conduct in the entries above, each committed, if committed, by employees acting in their employment.
Element 2 · Authorized or recklessly tolerated by a high managerial agent
PRIMARY SOURCEThe recorded retention conversation is this element in miniature: management acknowledging the state’s ineligibility determination and keeping the worker on the floor anyway.
ADJUDICATEDThe state’s notices document the concealment practice as policy, across campuses and years.
The pattern add-on · Three or more related episodes of enumerated offenses
ADJUDICATEDThe episodes are not hypothetical: the state cited “withholding or manipulating information” at both campuses, in separate notices, eleven days apart, on top of the years of under-documented restraint reports its findings describe. The eligible predicates are the fraud and concealment family; the abuse counts are not on the statute’s list, and this page does not pretend otherwise.
Who owns it
The Utah County Attorney or Attorney General; the pattern statute’s civil side belongs to anyone injured in business or property, with double damages.
Honestly against it
Pattern statutes are demanding, and Utah’s carries a loser-pays clause that disciplines weak civil filings.
What would close it
The same records as the fraud entries; the pattern is the fraud run more than twice.
The families’ shelf: what an injured resident’s lawyer would look at
Negligent hiring, supervision, and retentionUtah common law; Graves v. North Eastern Services, 2015
Record behind all 3 elements; per-child damages are each family’s to prove
Element 1 · A duty of care
CONFIRMEDCustody of children creates the heightened duty, and Utah’s Supreme Court holds it covers even intentional employee misconduct, with no expert needed to prove background-check negligence.
Element 2 · Breach
ADJUDICATEDThe state cited both campuses for screening failures by rule number: late applications, unchecked rosters, uncleared staff left unsupervised.
PRIMARY SOURCEThe footage shows it from inside, with the state’s determination letter read on camera: the Office of Background Processing found a worker “not eligible to have direct access to children and/or vulnerable adults,” and he kept working, with management on record that no one had talked about dismissing him.
Element 3 · Causation and damages
ADJUDICATEDFor the documented 2026 injury, the state’s own order carries the chain in one document: staff permitted the assault to escalate in their presence, and emergency care was delayed while the school called a transport van. What remains is per child: damages, and each injury’s own chain, which is the active suits’ work.
Who owns it
Injured former residents and their families.
Honestly against it
Utah routes care-sounding claims against licensed providers through the Malpractice Act: a two-year clock and a prelitigation panel, and federal courts applying Utah law have put this school inside that statute. The claims that avoid the shield sound in the enrollment transaction and in battery, and the 2026 injuries are inside any clock.
What would close it
The clearance-denial correspondence, which the state holds, and the retention emails the footage shows existed.
Battery, false imprisonment, intentional inflictionUtah common law
Record behind all 3 torts; the contested door is consent
Battery · harmful contact without lawful consent
PRIMARY SOURCERestraints at a recorded rate of 250 to 300 a month, a floor restraint continued after a clinical team prohibited it, chemical restraint described casually.
ADMITTEDAnd the company’s own 2021 statement concedes the practice category: “the infrequent use of medications to assist a patient in gaining control is within the standard of care.”
PRIMARY SOURCEMulti-week and multi-month solitary, described on the recordings as routine practice, at a facility whose license never authorized it.
ADMITTEDThe owner’s own 2021 statement says the practice had been eliminated, which concedes there is no lawful-authority account of it.
Intentional infliction · outrageous conduct, severe distress
ADJUDICATEDThe state’s own words carry this element’s character: discipline “intended to frighten or humiliate,” deprivation of water, rest, and toileting.
Who owns it
Former residents; parents on the fraud side of the consent seam.
Honestly against it
Consent forms and the malpractice-act routing are real defenses. The seam: if the enrollment contract pre-authorizes restraint and sedation in blanket form while the school publicly denied using seclusion, the gap between the signed form and the point-of-use reality is where battery meets fraud, and battery historically walks around the malpractice shield.
What would close it
The enrollment contract’s restraint and consent clauses. One subpoena.
Punitive exposure, and who it reachesUtah Code § 78B-8-201; Graves knew-or-should-have-known standard
Record behind both elements: the standard, and forty-four years of notice
Element 1 · The standard: knowing and reckless indifference
CONFIRMEDUtah’s punitive statute asks whether the defendant knew and proceeded anyway; on a pattern, knew-or-should-have-known suffices.
Element 2 · What the defendant knew, and when
ADJUDICATEDThe notice spine: a 1982 federal injunction at this facility; a 2020 federal settlement over this division’s billing; a five-year integrity agreement with annual certifications; state citations escalating for a decade, then monthly.
ADJUDICATEDThe recorded preference for leaving no written record because records are public.
ADMITTEDAnd the owner’s own filings price the conduct while it ran: behavioral-division liability reserves raised by roughly $25 million in the 2024 report and $18 million more in 2025. A company that budgets for the harm and continues has answered the indifference question in its own ledger. Each later act sits on top of every earlier notice.
Who owns it
Every civil plaintiff above; this is the multiplier, against a parent company with $17.4 billion in revenue.
Honestly against it
Punitives are reviewed hard on ratio and on whose conduct counts; the question is what the owner knew, and the integrity agreement is the document that answers it.
What would close it
The annual certifications: who signed, and what the facility’s internal record showed the same month.
The federal shelf: what Washington already owns
The False Claims Act31 U.S.C. § 3729; Utah Code 26B-3-1101
Record behind all 4 elements; the open number is the false fraction of the $32 million, which is discovery’s job
Element 1 · A claim to a government payer
PRIMARY SOURCE$32 million through four county Medicaid plans, to a facility enrolled on both campuses as a Medicaid psychiatric residential treatment facility. The channel is not alleged; it is a ledger.
Element 2 · Falsity
PRIMARY SOURCEMedicaid pays this facility type on the regulatory condition of active treatment. The per-diem’s treatment and education components meet a recorded floor of empty facilities, unlicensed staffing, TikTok schooling, and a discharge culture recorded as “not today,” the same failure-to-discharge class the 2020 settlement named.
ADJUDICATEDThe state’s findings describe the same floor.
ADMITTEDThe reclassification device is published on the school’s own website: at Provo Canyon, “everything is treatment.”
Element 3 · Knowledge
CONFIRMEDThe 2020 settlement resolved this exact claim family for this exact division, and the integrity agreement kept the company certifying compliance annually.
ADMITTEDThe company’s own annual report describes what was settled: claims “knowingly submitted” for services “not medically necessary.” The Supreme Court’s 2023 scienter case forecloses the ambiguity defense for a company on this much notice, and the controlling implied-certification case arose from this company’s own subsidiary.
Element 4 · Materiality
CONFIRMEDActive treatment is a written condition of payment, and the payer’s reaction to the truth is on the record: when the state that licenses the program saw the floor, it did not adjust a rate; it revoked the licenses.
Who owns it
The Department of Justice and Utah’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit. Utah’s act has no private relator, and a federal relator now faces the public-disclosure bar; this lane belongs to the government, and the referral infrastructure already exists, including a Senate committee’s 2024 Medicaid-fraud referral of this industry.
Honestly against it
The custody-not-worthless defense is real in the case law; the theory that survives it is services-not-rendered on the treatment and education components, not an attack on admissions medicine.
What would close it
The paid-claims file for the two campus provider numbers, and the treatment plans behind a sample of per-diems. Both exist; both are compellable.
The integrity agreement’s own machineryThe 2020 CIA, hosted above; 42 U.S.C. § 1320a-7
Record behind all 3 triggers, and the machinery has already been used once; what remains is an office’s decision
Trigger 1 · A false annual certification: $50,000 each
CONFIRMEDThe agreement required a facility chief executive’s certification and a board resolution every year for five years. The certifications are a countable set, and the conduct window they overlap is documented in section 1.
Trigger 2 · A material breach touching patient care: exclusion
PRIMARY SOURCEThe agreement’s own text makes a violation with “a material impact on the quality of patient care” an independent basis for excluding the entity from federal health programs.
ADJUDICATEDTwo abuse revocations are on the record.
Trigger 3 · The statute behind it
ADJUDICATEDSeparately from the agreement, the exclusion statute reaches any provider whose license was revoked for reasons bearing on professional competence or performance. That happened, twice, in July.
The machinery, already in use
CONFIRMEDNone of this is theoretical: the Inspector General’s public log shows stipulated penalties collected from the company’s subsidiaries under this agreement in 2023 and 2024, for employing individuals ineligible to work in federal health programs, the same pattern as the retained uncleared worker on the recordings.
Who owns it
The Inspector General of Health and Human Services. Administrative: no plaintiff, no jury, no live facility needed, and it reaches affiliated entities and responsible individuals nationally.
Honestly against it
The agreement expired in March 2026 and exclusion is discretionary; the question is whether the office uses the record the state built.
What would close it
The certifications and the monitor’s and reviewer’s reports, confidential under the agreement but federal records subject to request now that it has closed.
The constitutional claims of publicly placed children42 U.S.C. § 1983; Milonas; Schwartz v. Booker
Record behind all 3 elements for publicly placed residents; privately admitted residents have no lane here
Element 1 · Action under color of state law
ADJUDICATEDFor publicly placed youth at this school, the 1982 Tenth Circuit case supplies the holding, about this facility by name.
Element 2 · A federal right deprived
ADJUDICATEDInstitutionalized children hold rights to reasonably safe conditions and freedom from undue restraint; sections 1 and 5 are the record of what met them.
Element 3 · A cohort the doctrine covers
PRIMARY SOURCEThe publicly placed cohort is priced, not presumed: the state’s $23.4 million umbrella stream includes child-welfare and juvenile-justice placements, and the school holds a foster-care agency registration.
CORROBORATEDOregon removed its wards from the school in 2020, which proves the cohort twice over: the placed children existed, and a placing state acted on what it knew.
The Tenth Circuit separately holds a placing agency’s duty to its child is continuing and cannot be delegated to the facility, which puts the placing agencies themselves in reach.
Who owns it
Each publicly placed former resident, against the facility as state actor and the agency that placed and left them. Who was placed by whom is a records question, not a mystery.
Honestly against it
State-action doctrine is contested territory, cutting both ways: the Tenth Circuit kept the juvenile-custody line alive as recently as 2013, citing this school’s own case in a restraint-chair decision, Blackmon v. Sutton, but the same year it declined to find state action for a private hospital’s medical judgment during an involuntary hold, Wittner v. Banner Health, and no modern Utah federal case has re-applied the 1982 holding. Privately admitted residents have no claim in this lane at all.
What would close it
The placement ledgers: which agencies, which children, which years. The payment records already prove the ledgers exist.
The criminal civil-rights statute18 U.S.C. § 242
Record behind all 3 elements; under Screws, willfulness stays the fight, person by person
Element 1 · Under color of law
ADJUDICATEDTravels with the publicly placed children, on the 1982 holding about this school.
Element 2 · Willfully
CORROBORATEDThe standard is reckless disregard of a right made specific by prior decisions, and the 1982 case made it specific at this address; the Tenth Circuit restated the juvenile-custody right in 2013. The record behind the element runs on independent planes: a restraint continued in stated defiance of a clinical prohibition, “But we did”; the preference for unwritten records because written ones are public; compliance certifications signed while the conduct ran. Whether any named individual crossed the Screws line is exactly what a federal grand jury exists to answer, and it has not been asked.
Element 3 · Deprivation, with bodily injury
ADJUDICATEDThe injuries that escalate the penalty to ten years are in the state’s own record.
Who owns it
The United States Attorney for Utah and the Civil Rights Division. Only they can open it.
Honestly against it
Prosecutions under this statute against facility staff are rare but not unknown; the Department of Justice has charged juvenile-detention staff with it over a beating and its cover-up. A treatment-judgment defense is live for any individual, and uncharged means uncharged.
What would close it
The same isolation and restraint logs as the state counts, plus the placement sorting above.
The quiet self-executing consequences42 CFR Part 441 Subpart D; 42 CFR 455.416
Record behind both rows; nothing here is discretionary
Row 1 · The license is the billing predicate
ADJUDICATEDA Medicaid psychiatric residential treatment facility bills against its state license; revocation ends the predicate. Licenses revoked July 6 and 17, services ordered terminated August 6 and 16, no stay.
Row 2 · Disenrollment, and what billing past it means
ADJUDICATEDFederal rules require provider disenrollment on license revocation; a claim submitted past termination would be false on enrollment grounds alone, no floor evidence needed.
Who owns it
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Utah Medicaid, mechanically.
Honestly against it
Nothing; this entry is arithmetic. It is here because it converts the state’s licensing act into a federal program event without anyone deciding anything.
What would close it
Closed by the revocations themselves; the tripwire is any billing after the deadlines.
Three more federal frameworks belong on the shelf with shorter entries. Employing an individual the state had refused to clear, in a Medicaid facility, is its own civil-monetary-penalty exposure. The disability statutes reach institutionalized children as children with disabilities, though the Supreme Court has cut emotional-distress damages out of the Rehabilitation Act lane, which for survivors is most of the injury; the page says so rather than overselling it. And the education statutes make the placing school districts answerable for a “school” that the cameras recorded as no school at all, a lane that runs against the placing agencies with the facility as their contractor.
What juries have done with this division
Part 7 · The verdicts
ADMITTED The figures below are the company’s own disclosures to its shareholders.Source: Universal Health Services annual reports, legal proceedings and reserves sections, on file with the SEC.
What juries said, against what the company set aside
Every figure is from the owner’s own annual reports. The Pavilion’s outlined segment is the punitive share a court later cut; the reserve bars are what the company added to its own estimate of the division’s liabilities across the same period.
At the company’s Cumberland hospital, a jury returned $60 million in compensatory damages, trebled to $180 million, plus $120 million punitive; the company discloses roughly forty additional plaintiffs behind it and a next trial calendared for 2026, with the claims relating to occurrences in the 2020 policy year, which is to say, under the integrity agreement. At Pavilion, $60 million compensatory and $475 million punitive, the punitive figure later reduced to $120 million. The company’s own reserve entries move in step: behavioral-division self-insurance reserves increased by roughly $25 million in the 2024 report and roughly $18 million more in 2025. A public company must estimate what its conduct will cost; the estimate is rising, and it is printed in its own filings. Provo Canyon School appears in those filings one way: “Owned.” And one more line from the same shelf: the company’s own proxy concentrates 88.9 percent of shareholder voting power in its founding family.
What would settle it
Part 8 · The doors
Every open question above ends at a document that already exists. The enrollment contract would settle what parents consented to and who controls discharge. The five annual certifications would settle who told the federal government what, and when. The monitor’s and claims reviewer’s reports, confidential under the agreement but requestable now that it has closed, would settle whether the watching failed or was fed a groomed slice. The isolation logs would settle the durations and the orders. The paid-claims file for the two provider numbers would settle the fraud arithmetic. None of this is investigation; it is retrieval, and each document has an office with the power to compel it.
The tripwires this page will watch, each a future grade change: the August 16 Provo closure; the pending appeals, which carry no stay; the homepage-posting condition, unobserved as of publication; any billing past the termination dates; the Inspector General’s response to a licensed-revoked, integrity-agreement facility; and the next Cumberland trial. Three more, further out: the five-year bar on reapplying that the revocations start, which reaches the license’s owners and not just its name; the campuses themselves, roughly $33.5 million of single-purpose real estate by county assessment, whose sale, lease, or transfer to a fresh entity would be the industry’s documented next move, watched here by deed; and the Senate’s October 2024 Medicaid-fraud referral of this industry to the Department of Justice, whose public docket, so far, shows nothing. Each will be reported here when it moves.
Where this site stands
Part 9 · Attribution
This site reports on matters of public concern, and grades what it reports. The footage that opens this file was published by a YouTuber whose investigative work this site has covered extensively, and by a collaborator who spent about a month employed inside the school. Their published videos are reported here as attributed sources, the same way a filed complaint or an agency notice is: quoted, linked, and graded. The grades on this page are this site’s own, applied to the public record by the same standard used everywhere else on it. The state record, the federal record, the company’s filings, and the payment ledger stand independently of the footage; readers can verify every graded line without pressing play. The footage is what put the floor on camera.
CORROBORATEDSent Away, the investigative series from The Salt Lake Tribune, KUER, and APM Reports, documented this school’s citation history and the regulator’s years of forbearance long before the closure, and was still reporting when the licenses fell.Source: the series; the 2021 concussion investigation; the July 2026 closure report.
PRIMARY SOURCEWarehouses of Neglect, the Senate Finance Committee’s two-year investigation of four operators, this school’s owner among them, published June 2024: taxpayer-funded facilities leaving children under-supervised and untreated at rates up to $1,200 a day.Source: the committee’s report, as published.
ADJUDICATEDThe last undercover filmmaker was sued, not published. The company sued its February 2024 infiltrator within days, obtained turnover of his recordings, and closed the case on July 1, 2026 with a stipulated permanent injunction; his footage never became public; the injunction became final on July 1, and the first license fell five days later. The August 15 videos are the first undercover footage from inside this school ever published.Source: UHS of Provo Canyon, Inc. v. Bliss, D. Utah No. 2:24-cv-00163, docket; the sworn filings from that case are Part 5’s source.
CORROBORATEDThe 2026 record, independently reported: the delayed-care incident and sanctions, the revocations, and the families’ suits were each covered as they happened by newsrooms working from the same public documents this page grades.Source: The Salt Lake Tribune, June 2; Utah News Dispatch, July 17; KSL, June 15.
The fair reading, and its limit. Universal Health Services disagrees with the department’s decision, says patient safety is its priority, and is pursuing the appeals the law provides; the appeals are pending and will be reported here with the same grades as everything else. The revocations are agency actions, not court judgments. The criminal statutes walked above are frameworks with public evidence behind their elements, not charges; no charge has been filed on them, no individual is accused of a crime on this page, and every person is presumed innocent. The state’s own decade of measured responses is part of this record, and so is the fact that the company inherited a facility with a history older than its ownership. What the company cannot inherit its way out of is the window it owned: 2000 to the padlock.
Corrections requested by Universal Health Services or Provo Canyon School: none received as of August 15, 2026. Corrections with documentation are published, marked, and dated.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; agency actions described are under appeal, no individual is accused of a crime, and every person is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam