A Louisville man has been sentenced to time in federal prison for failing to report nearly $1 million in income to the Internal Revenue Service and for defrauding Kentucky’s Medicaid program. Hatem Kaisi, 52, previously pled guilty in court to three counts of filing false federal income tax returns and one count of healthcare fraud.
Kaisi admitted to failing to report $961,592 of income on tax returns filed from 2012 to 2014 with the IRS. Instead, Kaisi reported income earned from his automobile business on the federal income tax returns of others. This means that he owed the federal government $204,842.69 in income tax for the years 2001 through 2014. (He’d been shamelessly scamming the government for over a decade.)
As part of his plea deal, Kaisi revealed that he concealed his actual income from the Department for Medicaid Services. From 2008 through 2014, Kaisi failed to disclose over $200,000 of income per year to fraudulently qualify his family for Medicaid benefits. (These are benefits meant for individuals who can’t actually afford healthcare. Kasi could’ve afforded a mouth full of gold teeth and some Beverly Hills plastic surgery.)
Kaisi was sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. (Seems like a light sentence for defrauding the government out of over a quarter of a million dollars.) He also agreed to forfeit $347,095 that the federal government previously seized from his bank account due to the health care fraud conviction.
Federal authorities agreed to recommend that $204,842.69 of the forfeited funds will go toward the restitution Kaisi owes to the Kentucky Department for Medicaid Services. Kaisi also owes $209,910.80 in restitution to the IRS.
This is not Kaisi’s first encounter with the law. Kaisi had also pleaded guilty in 2009 to structuring bank deposits to evade federal reporting requirements. (He didn’t learn his lesson then, and something tells me he won’t learn his lesson now.)
Today’s Fraud of the Day comes from an article, “Louisville man sentenced to prison for failing to report nearly $1 million in income,” published by Courier Journal on April 10, 2021.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A Louisville man was sentenced to a year in prison for failing to report nearly $1 million in income to the Internal Revenue Service and for defrauding Kentucky’s Medicaid program, federal authorities announced Friday.
U.S. District Judge Greg Stivers sentenced Hatem Kaisi, 52, to 12 months and one day in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, Acting U.S. Attorney Michael Bennett said in a Friday news release.
