West Virginia doctor guilty of tax fraud

Date: Nov. 19, 2024

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Clarksburg, WV - A Wheeling, West Virginia, physician was convicted today of failing to pay nearly $2.5 million in payroll taxes, United States Attorney William Ihlenfeld announced.

A federal jury found Nitesh Ratnakar guilty of 41 counts of tax fraud. Ratnakar owned and operated a gastroenterology practice and a medical equipment manufacturer in Elkins, West Virginia. Jurors heard testimony that he withheld payroll taxes from his employees' paychecks and failed to make $2,419,560 in required payments to the Internal Revenue Service. Ratnakar also filed false tax returns in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Ratnakar is facing up to five years in prison for each of the first 38 tax fraud counts and up to three years for the remaining tax fraud counts. A federal district court judge will determine the sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jarod Douglas and Eleanor Hurney prosecuted the case on behalf of the government.

The Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) investigated the case.

IRS-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. IRS-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.