Date: December 15, 2023 Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov Alexandria, VA — A Fairfax doctor pleaded guilty today and has agreed to pay $3.1 million in taxes and $2.2 million to insurance companies for corruptly obstructing the IRS by underreporting his income and filing false tax returns in connection with his medical practice. According to court documents, Dr. Jasser Thiara owned and operated an obstetrics medical practice, doing business as Mid-Atlantic Ob-Gyn, and another doctor's office specializing in pain management called Fairfax Pain Clinic. To reduce his taxable income for the 2017 to 2020 tax years, Thiara filed false returns for Mid-Atlantic that claimed bogus business deductions, which fraudulently decreased the company's business income. Thiara then filed false individual income tax returns, which did not fully report the income that he had received from MidAtlantic. Thiara also failed to report hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in gross receipts generated by Fairfax Pain Clinic. In addition to the Mid-Atlantic and Fairfax Pain Clinic schemes, from 2014 through approximately 2016, Thiara received payments for prescriptions referred to certain Virginia pharmacies owned by Mohamed Abdalla, even though some of Mid-Atlantic's contracts with insurers expressly prohibited such arrangements. In some instances, Abdalla billed insurance companies for these prescriptions but did not send the medications to patients in order to increase profits. Some patients contacted Mid-Atlantic to complain that they had been provided with medicine that they had not requested or did not need. In other instances, patients complained to Mid-Atlantic that their insurance companies had been billed for prescriptions that they had not received, knew nothing about, and did not need. In total, Thiara received approximately $2.2 million from the "referral" scheme, and neither reported, nor paid taxes on this income. Finally, for the 2017 to 2020 tax years, Thiara used a business called NTMT to receive payments for medical services billed out-of-network, principally from Aetna and United Healthcare, even though Thiara was an in-network provider for both insurers. Thiara then filed returns which falsely reported that NTMT had received minimal to no business income, when in fact it had received millions of dollars from insurance companies. In total, Thiara did not pay the Internal Revenue Service $3,172,001 in taxes owed for the tax years 2015 to 2020. Thiara used these funds to purchase a lavish $3.5 million residence and a $340,000 Ferrari, and spent hundreds of thousands more on credit cards and luxury items. Thiara is scheduled to be sentenced on March 15, 2024. He faces a maximum penalty of 3 years in prison. Actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after taking into account the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors. Thiara has also agreed to pay $3,172,001 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service and another $2,214,830 to third-party victims. Adballa was sentenced on March 19, 2021, to four years in prison for his role in the kickback scheme. Jessica D. Aber, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia; Kareem Carter, Special Agent in Charge of the IRS Criminal Investigation (CI) Washington Field Office; David Geist, Acting Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Washington Field Office Criminal Division; Maureen R. Dixon, Special Agent in Charge of the Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); Christopher Dillard, Special Agent in Charge for the Department of Defense, Defense Criminal Investigative Service's (DCIS) Mid-Atlantic Field Office; Derek Holt, Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM); and George Scavdis, Special Agent in Charge, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Office of Criminal Investigations, Metro Washington Field Office, made the announcement after Senior U.S District Judge Claude M. Hilton accepted the plea. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jack Morgan and Zoe Bedell are prosecuting the case. CI is the criminal investigative arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money-laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a more than a 90 percent federal conviction rate. The agency has 20 field offices located across the U.S. and 12 attaché posts abroad.
