TRENTON, N.J. - Prescription-benefits manager Medco Health Solutions Inc. has agreed to pay $155 million in fines to settle fraud, kickback and other charges brought by federal prosecutors in Philadelphia in a whistleblower case dating to 1999.

The agreement, announced Monday by Pat Meehan, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, involves multiple cases of alleged wrongdoing by Medco, the nation's No. 2 pharmacy benefit manager. The settlement comes nearly six months after the two sides announced an agreement in principle shortly before a trial was to begin.

"This settlement and others like it represent a sweeping change in the way pharmacy benefit managers do business," Meehan said in a statement, noting his office reached a $137 million settlement last year with Medco's biggest competitor, Nashville, Tenn.-based Caremark Rx Inc.

"Hidden financial agreements between PBMs and drug manufacturers and health plans, along with the bottom-line pressures of management, can influence which drugs patients receive, the price we all pay for drugs and whether pharmacists serve patients with their undivided professional judgment," Meehan said.

Franklin Lakes-based Medco said in a statement that there was no finding of wrongdoing by the company or any of its people, an agreement typical in government prosecutions of corporations.

"Even though we did nothing wrong, for our company and our clients it is the right decision to put these aged matters in the past," Medco said in a statement.

Among other charges, Medco was accused of paying health-insurance plans kickbacks to obtain their business and of soliciting kickbacks from drug manufacturers to favor their drugs over competitors' products, partly by illegally pressuring pharmacists and doctors to switch prescriptions. Medco also was accused of destroying patient prescriptions when its mail-order pharmacies did not fill them as quickly as required by its insurance plan contracts.

Those issues were brought to light by three whistleblowers, Associate U.S. Attorney Jim Sheehan said in an interview. One of them was a government informant and the other two were pharmacists employed at Medco's Las Vegas pharmacy who told the government the operation was poorly run, with prescriptions with the wrong number of pills or other problems being shipped to customers anyway.

To settle those allegations, Medco will pay the government $137.5 million, Sheehan said. Medco also must set up a strict program to ensure it complies with all Medicare requirements and pharmacy practice requirements, with both an independent reviewer and the U.S. Attorney's Office reviewing its records annually for five years, he said.

Meanwhile, Medco will pay an additional $9.5 million to settle other civil charges in a case that Meehan's office expects to announce soon, Sheehan said.

The remaining $8 million will cover a third case, Sheehan said, involving a Medco program that helped its health plan clients get reimbursed by Medicare for diabetes testing supplies used by retired workers. Medco, which used a third-party contractor to run that program, reported problems with it to the U.S. Attorney's Office and ended the program, Sheehan said.

"What their contractor did was to create false documents to get payment from Medicare," Sheehan said.

Medco announced the tentative settlement on May 5, when it reported on its first-quarter profit. That quarter, Medco took a charge of $163 million before taxes, or 32 cents per share, to settle multiple federal legal cases.

The issues covered by the $163 million charge included inflating the drug prices government health programs paid to Medco, the company said at the time.

Medco handles prescription benefits for about 58 million Americans, either by processing electronic claims from retail pharmacies or by shipping medications directly from its dozen mail-order pharmacies around the country.

In trading on the New York Stock Exchange Monday, Medco shares rose 12 cents to $57.60.