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Texas-based builder Speed Fab-Crete Corp. has entered into a non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, wherein it admitted to illegally employing undocumented workers and agreed to forfeit $3 million to the U.S. Treasury for use in promoting law enforcement activities related to immigration enforcement.
Additionally, the agreement requires Speed Fab-Crete to cooperate with the government to ensure it will not violate immigration laws in future; i.e. the company pledged to continue to use E-Verify; to comply with new internal verification procedures; to conduct company-wide training on immigration compliance; and to discipline those who attempt to employ unauthorized workers.
Earlier in January 2020, the owners of Speed Fab-Concrete, Carl Eugene Hall, David Leon Bloxom and Ronald Alan Hamm, and its chief financial officer, Robert Edwin James pled guilty to felony charges - unlawful harboring and employment of undocumented workers, in U.S. District Court in Dallas, Texas, for their roles in processing undocumented workers through a labor staffing company, Take Charge Staffing. See http://discuss.ilw.com/blogs/bbuchan...mented-workers.
The company’s three owners are jointly and severally liable for the full amount if Speed Fab-Crete does not fulfill its financial obligations under the non-prosecution agreement.
According to their plea papers and Speed Fab-Crete’s factual statement, the defendants admitted that they attempted to disguise the employment of unauthorized workers at Speed Fab-Crete by placing them on the payroll of Take Charge Staffing, then lied to the government, stating that the unauthorized workers had been terminated from employment at Speed Fab-Crete.
According to court records, in September 2016, the owners of Speed Fab-Crete met with the owner of Take Charge Staffing, Mark Sevier, and they agreed to transfer the unauthorized workers from Speed Fab-Crete’s payroll system onto Take Charge Staffing’s payroll, and have them assigned to Speed Fab-Crete. Thereafter, the plan was implemented with 23 former employees hired by Take Charge Staffing and assigned to Speed Fab-Crete.
On October 11, 2016, Speed Fab-Crete notified ICE by letter that 39 of the unauthorized workers were “no longer working at Speed Fab-Crete Corporation.” Each of the individuals and the company admitted that this was a false and misleading statement to the government.
This is at least the fifth federal indictment, plea bargain or criminal forfeiture in the past 6 months, involving owners of companies, who re-hired undocumented workers after an ICE audit of its I-9 forms. The common theme in these criminal actions is ICE conducts an audit of the company’s I-9 forms, ICE issues a Notice of Suspect Documents alleging employees did not provide valid work authorizations, the company tells ICE those employees have been discharged, and then the undocumented workers are re-hired under different circumstances. See prior blog articles - http://discuss.ilw.com/blogs/bbuchan...mented-workers; http://discuss.ilw.com/blogs/bbuchan...fter-ice-audit; http://discuss.ilw.com/blogs/bbuchan...nal-forfeiture;
If you are concerned about your company’s immigration compliance, including possible employment of undocumented workers, I invite you to read The I-9 and E-Verify Handbook, a book that I co-authored with Greg Siskind, available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/0997083379.
