The father-and-son owners of two construction firms in Jacksonville have pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service. They also admitted to employing illegal aliens, most of them had been previously deported.
Raul Solis, 52, and Raul Solis-Martinez, 32, owned and operated Solis Brothers Company LLC and Duval Framing LLC. Both are subcontracting companies in Jacksonville.
To keep labor costs down, both father and son collaborated with each other — and the owner of another contractor, H&S Framing LLC — to pay their employees “off the books”.
“By paying employees with a mix of checks and cash, the conspirators avoided withholding the full amount of payroll taxes owed to the IRS… Between 2014 and 2019, Solis and Solis-Martinez’s workers received approximately $22,186,096.35 in wages that were never reported to the IRS and from which no taxes were withheld,” according to a release from the Department of Justice.
This allowed the business owners to avoid paying more than $5,613,000 in taxes.
According to the United States Attorney’s Office, the father and son committed fraud against the company that was responsible for their workers’ compensation insurance and their payroll functions.
According to the press release, Solis and Solis-Martinez were aware of the fact that a significant percentage of their employees were either illegal immigrants who had entered the country illegally or people who lacked the authorization to be employed in the United States of America.
The two have agreed to repay $5,613,082.38 to the IRS. A sentencing hearing will be held at a later date.
More details of this report from ‘The Daily Wire’:
On Thursday, a Tampa, Florida, man was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison after being convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Kelbin Tejada ran a company that supplied workers for various manual labor jobs in the area. Per Florida law, Tejada was required to have adequate insurance for each of his employees. Many of the individuals supplied by Tejada to various construction were illegal aliens.
Yet, in the course of business, Tejada “falsely and fraudulently” claimed in insurance applications that his company had a smaller payroll and number of workers working on job sites than in reality. Tejada also “falsely and fraudulently sent wire communications to numerous contractors representing that his company’s employees had full worker’s compensation coverage,” a DOJ press release noted.
In actuality, Tejada had been cashing $18,000,000 in checks from various construction contractors for these employees, while shielding the number of workers on his payroll. That figure “far exceeded the very limited payroll figures that Tejada had reported to his worker’s compensation insurance company.” That meant his workers were inadequately insured.
“Mr. Tejada not only defrauded insurance companies of thousands of dollars in premiums by lying on his policy application, more importantly he severely jeopardized the health and well-being of non-citizen laborers who work long hours in hazardous positions,” Homeland Security Investigations Tampa Assistant Special Agent in Charge John Dumas said in a statement.
“HSI Special Agents and our law enforcement partners are committed to ensuring that all workers performing these jobs have the safety net of proper workman’s compensation insurance,” Dumas added.
Sources: DailyWire, Justice.gov