Washington: An American court yesterday sentenced an Indian-origin man to 30 months in prison for facilitating illegal entry of Indians into the US.
The New Jersey court also ordered Sandip Kumar Patel to pay a fine of USD 50,000 and restitution to the amount of USD 423,452 to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Last year Patel, a resident of Edison in New Jersey, had pleaded guilty to the charges.
According to court documents filed in connection with his plea, from 2001 until 2009, Patel sponsored the visa applications of Indian nationals by falsely claiming that he would provide employment for them in the US. Patel falsely certified on the visa applications that he would employ the migrants in various technical fields at several New Jersey companies, thereby facilitating their illegal entry into the US.
Over the course of the scheme, migrants paid Patel tens of thousands of dollars for the false certifications. To disguise the scheme, Patel issued payroll checks and other payroll forms.
Patel required the migrants to return the proceeds of the payroll checks to him and to further reimburse him for the payroll tax expenses he incurred.
Patel used the fraudulent pay stubs and payroll checks to support false applications to extend the visas, and charged the migrants fees for the visa extensions, court documents alleged.
As a result, Patel overstated his payroll expenses on his federal income tax returns by more than USD 1.4 million over four years, and thereby underreported his tax obligation by over USD 400,000 for those years.
