Ethics

Company That Refused to Pay Workers Hired to Replace Border Fence

Written by SK Ashby

Stop me if you've heard this one before: the Trump regime has contracted a company with one (1) single employee for a ten million dollar project.

And that's not the worst part. The Associated Press reports that the one-man company contracted to replace a section of existing fence on the southern border has a history of refusing to pay subcontractors.

The contractor, New York-based Coastal Environmental Group -- listed as SWF Constructors in the contracting documents for some reason -- was even sued by the federal government.

Thomas Anderson, an Omaha lawyer who initially represented a subcontractor that sued Coastal in 2011, said he wouldn’t be surprised if it was an attempt to dodge scrutiny of past legal problems. He says such a practice is relatively common in construction projects. [...]

In 2011, the federal government sued Coastal on behalf of Anderson’s client as part of a multimillion-dollar lead cleanup project at an EPA Superfund site in northeast Omaha. The lawsuit accused Coastal of failing to pay the subcontractor, Enviroworks Inc., nearly $400,000 in labor and equipment costs and of reneging on a profit sharing agreement that cheated the subcontractor out of about $1.7 million.

Government lawyers said Coastal’s refusal to pay forced the subcontractor to lay off most of its employees. Immediately after employees were notified of the layoffs, the lawsuit alleged, “Coastal hired and used the Enviroworks employees as its own and continued to perform the work that Enviroworks was entitled to do,” the lawsuit alleged.

Things like this and the botched contracts with one-person companies in Puerto Rico tells you how much Republicans actually respect taxpayer dollars.

They don't.