United States v. Hakop Gambaryan

MEMORANDUM

Hakop Gambaryan (“Gambaryan”) was convicted after trial of billing Medicare for power wheelchairs he provided to Medicare beneficiaries for whom the devices were not medically necessary, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1347 (a). At sentencing, the district judge found that over $2.5 million of Gambaryan’s total Medicare billings were fraudulent. The application of the then-applicable Sentencing Guidelines for cases in which the intended loss exceeds $2.5 million, U.S.S.G. § 2Bl.l(b)(l)(J) (2014), along with an additional enhancement we discuss below, id. § 2Bl.l(b)(7), resulted in a Guidelines range of sixty-three to seventy-eight months.

The district judge imposed a sentence of eighty-four months, after considering the factors set out in 18 U.S.C. § 3553 (a) and “evaluating] the various kinds of sentences available as well as the Guidelines sentencing range.” While Gambaryan does not challenge the substantive reasonableness of the sentence, he does argue that the district judge erred in calculating the appropriate Guidelines range. Because the Guidelines must be correctly calculated—if they are to be taken into account, as they must be, in determining an appropriate…