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NYC cardiologist with V.S. office pleads guilty

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A Manhattan vascular surgeon with an office in Valley Stream and his wife, an attorney, pleaded guilty on April 14 to obstructing the IRS by lying about expenses and providing false invoices for services.

Jeffrey Stein, 58, and Marla Stein, 52, had their 2010-2011 joint tax returns audited by the IRS in 2013. Investigators discovered that the pair reported “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in false expenses, aiming to lower their tax bills, according to the IRS and the U.S. attorney’s Manhattan office.

On some of the “bogus” invoices, Stein used the names of four disabled veterans, which he got via his contract with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Stein claimed that he had been billed more than $126,000 for services provided to the veterans.

Marla Stein provided investigators with false invoices for labor and advertising services that were never provided. On the invoices, she listed the name of a photographer that had recently worked with a relative but not her.

The Steins also paid a domestic employee $15,000 a year in cash to clean and take care of the couple’s children, but never reported it to the IRS, hoping to avoid employment taxes, the attorney’s office said.

Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney prosecuting the case, said the couple exposed themselves by trying to alter records from 2009 to 2012 after they had been audited, and by using the real names of the veterans and photographers.

“As they admitted today, Jeffrey Stein and Marla Stein not only cheated the IRS by claiming hundreds of thousands of dollars of false deductions on their tax returns, they doubled down on their fraud by using the identities of others to create false documents in an attempt to snooker the IRS again — this time during an audit,” he said. “Lawyers, doctors, and indeed all taxpayers have an obligation not only to report their income and expenses truthfully, but also to deal in an honest and forthright manner with the IRS when it conducts an audit.”

Jeffrey Stein faces up to eight years in prison and Marla faces three years. They will be sentenced on July 28 in front of a U.S. District Court Judge.

Multiple calls to Stein’s Valley Stream office, located at 1 S. Central Ave., and to his Manhattan office, were not returned.