The owner of a Columbia medical practice was ordered to pay more than $142,600 in restitution and other costs for failing to remit employee contributions and loan repayments to the company's 401K plan, the U.S. Department of Labor said Thursday.
David O. Nyanjom, Laura Nyanjom, Pulmonary Disease & Critical Care Associates and the company's 401 (k) plan must pay $66,474 in unremitted contributions and payments and the balance in pre-judgment interest and costs of appointing an independent fiduciary according to a consent judgment in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.
The practice, which had served patients in Baltimore and in Howard and Prince George's counties for two decades, closed and stopped following clinical outpatients as of October, according to its website. An attorney for the Nyajoms said they likely would have no comment, and they did not return calls for comment.
The secretary of labor had filed a complaint after the department's Employee Benefits Security Administration investigated the practice.
Investigators found that David Nyanjom, sole owner of the practice, established the 401 (k) plan in 1998 and oversaw it with Laura Nyanjom. But they failed to make sure contributions and repayments were sent to and collected by the plan in a timely manner, the complaint alleged. Employees of Patuxent Hospitalists LLC, also owned by Nyanjom, had participated in the plan.
The judgment, agreed to Tuesday by the defendants, bars them from serving as fiduciaries to any plan governed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.