Dr. Rajiv Yakhmi Sentenced to One Year in Prison for Health Care Fraud and Income Tax Fraud

Source- http://www.fbi.gov/cincinnati/press-releases/2011/physician-sentenced-to-one-year-in-prison-for-health-care-fraud-and-income-tax-fraud

COLUMBUS—Dr. Rajiv Yakhmi, 46, of Powell, Ohio, was sentenced in U.S. District Court here to 12 months and one day in prison and ordered to pay $310,000 plus interest and penalties to the IRS and an additional $590,278.60 to the government and private health care insurers he defrauded.

Carter M. Stewart, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio; Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine; Lamont Pugh, Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS); Jose A. Gonzalez, Special Agent in Charge, Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation, Cincinnati Field Office (IRS); and J. Mark Batts, Acting Special Agent in Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced the guilty plea entered before U.S. District Judge Gregory L. Frost.

Yakhmi pleaded guilty on January 11, 2011 to one count of health care fraud and to one count of willfully filing a false income tax return with the IRS.

According to court documents, Yakhmi is a licensed medical doctor who had an office located at 2415 Deewood Drive, Columbus, Ohio. Between October 2005 and November 2007, Yakhmi contracted with DosHealth billing service to submit medical claims on his behalf to the Medicare and Medicaid programs as well as to private insurers. DosHealth relied on patient information provided by Yakhmi to submit medical claims to Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers.

Yakhmi knowingly submitted or caused to be submitted claims for patient office visits and medical services, including, but not limited to psychological tests, pulmonary stress tests and audio tests, knowing that such services were wrongfully coded, medically unnecessary or not provided to his patients.

In addition, on Wednesdays during part of 2006 and 2007, Yakhmi refused to accept insurance and accepted cash only from his patients for medical services and office visits which he knowingly failed to report as income on his 2006 and 2007 federal income tax returns.

The investigation discovered that in late 2006, Dr Yakhmi devised a scheme to evade federal income taxes by opening a checking account with Key Bank in the name of “Spyder Medical”. Dr. Yakhmi wrote checks from his business checking account with Huntington National Bank to “Spyder Medical” to make it appear as though he had purchased the equipment from “Spyder Medical” for his medical practice; thereby claiming a fraudulent expense of $108,000 on his 2006 Federal Income Tax return.

In November, 2007, Yakhmi terminated his contracts with Medicaid and Medicare as well as private insurance and began only accepting cash payments from his patients for all office visits and medical services. The investigation revealed that Yakhmi knowingly failed to report a significant amount of these cash payments as income to the IRS on his 2007 and 2008 federal tax income tax returns.


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