A medical doctor and resident of Lake Forest has been sentenced to nearly three years in federal prison for evading $1.6 million in taxes by hiding assets and lying to the IRS.
Krishnaswami Sriram, 67, a Lake Forest resident and a medical doctor, pleaded guilty to tax evasion in March in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
Court records and statements from court showed that Sriram evaded payment of approximately $1.6 million he owed to the IRS from approximately 2011 to 2017.
Federal prosecutors said Sriram transferred ownership, in name only, of two rental properties from himself to his children without their knowledge, even though he continued to receive income from the properties.
He also transferred approximately $700,000 from bank accounts he controlled in the United States to accounts in India.
Sriram submitted documents to the IRS that omitted an investment account in the United States, bank and investment accounts in India, and ownership of the rental properties in order to fraudulently reduce the money he owed the IRS.
Sriram also admitted as part of the plea that he caused false billing to Medicare for episodes of in-home physician care between February 2012 and January 2022.
Sriram purported to have provided the care to Medicare beneficiaries on dates when those beneficiaries resided in inpatient facilities other than their homes or were deceased, prosecutors said.
Sriram’s false statements in medical records relating to the episodes of care resulted in false billing to Medicare in the amount of $136,980.36.
Court records show prosecutors sought the maximum sentence of 51 months in prison for Sriram, citing his prior criminal convictions for similar offenses that he pleaded guilty to in 2002 and was released from prison in 2010.
“For all practical purposes, from the moment Krishnaswami Sriram resolved his tax and healthcare fraud convictions in 2010, he was planning the commission, and then acting on that plan, of the same crimes in substantially the same way,” prosecutors said.
“Nothing says more, nor more honestly, than what the defendant tells this Court by his commission of the very same crimes, in substantially the same manner, immediately after he paid his debt to society. And what his actions say to this Court is that he thinks so little of our tax laws, so little of the sanctity of the healthcare system, and so little of the punishment from his previous convictions, that he was willing to dare the government to catch him if we could,” prosecutors said.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge John Robert Blakey sentenced Sriram to 34 months in the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
He was also ordered to pay approximately $1.7 million in restitution and serve three years of supervised release.
Sriram was ordered to surrender to prison on November 18.