Doctor pleads guilty to tax charge

A former radiologist at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of failing to pay state taxes in 2004, when he was billing the county for marathon shifts at the troubled public hospital.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David Horwitz sentenced Dr. Harold A. Tate, 47, to three years’ probation and ordered him to pay back taxes of $35,138 and a $10,000 fine.

Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley’s Public Integrity Division began its investigation in 2005 after a county health department audit suggested that Tate billed for more hours than he had worked.

The Times had previously reported that King/Drew paid more than $1.3 million for Tate’s services between March 2004 and February 2005. The radiologist, a temporary worker who was employed under a contract at the hospital, had said he worked an average of 20 hours a day, seven days a week, during one six-month stretch, records show.

The county paid Reliable Health Care Services Inc., an agency that supplies temporary workers to hospitals, up to $225 per hour for Tate’s services.

The district attorney’s office had said it could find no evidence of other criminal wrongdoing based on the hours Tate worked. His timecards had been approved by hospital personnel and his productivity appeared to be higher than that of any other radiologist at King/Drew, the investigation found.

“Dr. Tate’s accountant failed to file the return, even though all the information had been supplied to him,” Tate’s lawyer, Mark Ravis, said in a statement Wednesday. “Most of the taxes due for 2004 were timely paid by Dr. Tate in the form of withholding tax from his wages. Dr. Tate was unaware that his return had not been filed, but, nonetheless, accepts responsibility for the failure to timely file the return.”

charles.ornstein@latimes.com