D.A.’s target employers who skirt labor, tax laws

NANUET– Companies that pay workers off the books or miscategorize workers cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year, officials speaking at a conference about enforcing New York’s new labor laws said yesterday.

Marty GlennonThe meeting, held at the Comfort Inn on Route 59, was attended by about 60 representatives of state and local law enforcement, the construction industry and the state Labor Department.

The problem is particularly acute within the construction industry, which relies heavily on day laborers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants.

Some employers skirt labor laws to avoid paying payroll taxes and benefits, officials said.

“The prevailing-wage law levels the playing field,” said Marty Glennon, an attorney for a Long Island-based law firm that specializes in labor law. Advocates of the prevailing-wage law say it requires contractors to compete fairly for government contracts and it provides higher-quality projects.

But violations of that law are rarely prosecuted locally, he said.

Glennon and Christopher Nicolino, assistant district attorney in Nassau County, said localities have much to gain by prosecuting violations of labor laws.

Nicolino said wage and tax prosecutions in Nassau County had recouped $5 million due workers and helped the county finance its investigative efforts into other violations.

He provided a detailed presentation on strategies that investigators can use to go after employers who fail to pay their payroll taxes.

The methods include using so-called “salts,” workers who act as informants at a construction site, providing information to investigators.

New Rockland County District Attorney Thomas Zugibe attended the forum with several members of his staff.

Zugibe said he intends to vigorously pursue violators of labor laws in Rockland County. He said his predecessor, Michael Bongiorno, was lax in doing so.

“I’m going to go after these cases,” he said.

Blauvelt electrical contractor Paul Valentine agreed with the presenters that scofflaws should be prosecuted.

Still, he said, he had concerns about Nicolino’s suggestion that investigators use union workers as salts to infiltrate work sites that may be using day laborers and not paying them properly or paying the taxes owed on their behalf.

The issue of worker misclassification isn’t limited to only nonunion shops, said Valentine, owner of Valentine Electric, which employs nonunion labor.

Union shops, too, put workers into erroneous categories to avoid paying prevailing wages, Valentine said.

The problem will cost the downstate economy $558 million this year, according to a recent report from the Fiscal Policy Institute.

Reach David Schepp at [email protected] or 845-578-2437.

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