North Texas company agrees to pay $3 million over scheme to hire undocumented workers
A North Texas company will pay the government $3 million for its role in a scheme to illegally hire undocumented immigrants, a Department of Justice official announced on Monday.
Speed Fab-Crete in Kennedale agreed to the payment in a non-prosecution agreement with the US. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas. The $3 million will be forfeited to the U.S. Treasury for use in promoting law enforcement activities related to immigration enforcement, according to a Justice Department news release.
While no charges were filed against the company, five individuals have already pleaded guilty in connection with the crime. Four executives at Speed Fab-Crete, a precast concrete manufacturing company, hid two dozen undocumented employees from Immigration & Customs Enforcement and have pleaded guilty, authorities said.
Charged in the case were Speed Fab-Crete owners Carl Hall, David Bloxom and Ronald Hamm, and Chief Financial Officer Robert James. Mark Sevier, the owner of Take Charge Staffing, the Fort Worth temp agency to which the employees were transferred, was also charged.
Bloxom is a former Fort Worth school board member.
Hall and Sevier pleaded guilty to conspiracy to unlawfully harbor illegal aliens, a felony. Bloxom, Hamm and James pleaded guilty to unlawful employment of aliens, a misdemeanor.
Hall and Sevier face a maximum of five years in prison, while Bloxom, Hamm and James face maximum sentences of six months in federal prison. As part of the plea agreements, each individual will be also required to pay a $69,000 fine.
“An inspection revealed these defendants knowingly hired dozens of unauthorized workers, in flagrant disregard of U.S. law,” Erin Nealy Cox, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said in the release. “Worse yet, rather than working with ICE to resolve their violations, they attempted to deceive the government.”
The undocumented employees’ concealment occurred between April 2016 and August 2017, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas.
Homeland Security Investigations agents in October 2015 reviewed I-9 forms and determined that about 40 Speed Fab-Crete employees were not authorized to work in the United States because they were in the country illegally, according to the case’s charging document.
The company notified the government that it had released the employees, but had not. It moved 23 of them to Take Charge Staffing’s payroll.
The defendants “unlawfully enriched themselves by shielding from detection” the undocumented workers, according to the charging document.
Speed Fab-Crete negotiated a non-prosecutorial agreement with the government, and no charges were filed against the company, its attorney, Matthew Orwig, wrote in response to a request from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for comment on the defendants’ guilty pleas.
“The company has been in full compliance since the violations and will continue to monitor our workforce to avoid any future issues,” Orwig wrote.
The violations did not involve Speed Fab-Crete’s general contracting business or projects and were limited to its precast concrete manufacturing plant, Orwig wrote.
In addition to the payment, Speed Fab-Crete has pledged to continue to use E-Verify, the federal government’s web-based employment eligibility verification system to comply with new internal verification procedures and to conduct company-wide training on immigration compliance.
This report contains information from Star-Telegram archives.
This story was originally published January 27, 2020 at 1:59 PM.
