One of the most prestigious private hospitals in the United States, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, has paid $1.26m (0.8m; €1m) to settle federal charges of deliberately billing public health services, including the Medicare and Medicaid insurance programmes, for pathology work it never performed.

The US Department of Justice and four whistleblowers at the hospital had accused the clinic of submitting claims for nonexistent pathology tests from 1999 to 2007.

The Mayo Clinic has said that the claims were submitted in error over the eight year period until the point in 2007 when it discovered and corrected its mistake. But federal prosecutors said …