A dentist from Sedalia, named Nohaud Naseef Azan, aged 66, was sentenced in federal court for deliberately concealing over $617,000 in earnings from the IRS during a span of six years.

Judge Roseann A. Ketchmark presided over the sentencing, where Azan received a prison term of one year and one day without the possibility of parole. Additionally, the court mandated Azan to pay $269,517 in restitution to the IRS.

Azan, who runs his own dental practice in Sedalia, pleaded guilty on December 15, 2022, to one count of attempting to obstruct the administration of internal revenue laws.

The IRS had audited Azan and his practice in 2011 due to the improper deduction of personal expenses on his corporate tax returns for the preceding three years. Azan confessed that during the audit, he resorted to cashing patients’ checks made out to the dental practice or depositing them into his personal bank account to sustain his business’s payment of personal expenses. Over the period of 2011 to 2018, the IRS found over 1,000 checks that Azan had either cashed or deposited.

Azan admitted to diverting funds from these cashed checks for personal use, including funding his gambling habit, and failing to report them as income on both his personal and corporate tax returns. According to court records, Azan cashed a total of $617,472 in patients’ checks from 2013 to 2018, using the funds for gambling and other personal expenditures. The IRS incurred a total tax loss of $269,517 over the six-year period.