Queens Contractor Must Pay $200K For Stiffing Workers: Comptroller

NEW YORK CITY — A Queens electrical contractor must pay $200,000 after brazenly stiffing workers out of pay for jobs in public schools across New York City, said city Comptroller Brad Lander.

Charan Electrical Enterprises and its owner Kulwant Deol will be barred for five years from being awarded any public work contract in the city and state under a court order leveled by Lander last week.

The order came after a prevailing wage probe by a city law judge, who found Deol "engaged in a deliberate, flagrant scheme to underpay workers on public works projects by failing to list them on their payrolls, paying them in cash, and instructing them to use aliases."

"The flagrancy of the scheme merits imposition of the maximum civil penalty," the judge wrote in her report.

Messages left for the Long Island City-based Charan Electrical on a phone number and email listed on its website weren't returned as of publication.

The case began in May when Lander sued Charan Electrical on accusations the company didn't pay prevailing wages to two workers, documents state.

The workers labored on public school projects in every borough but Manhattan between October 2015 and March 2017, but were underpaid for the long hours they worked, officials said.

They did a variety of tasks, often without training and largely relating to electrical work such as wiring different areas of school, installing lights, changing scoreboards and more, documents state.

Both said they were given fake company identification and OSHA cards, according to documents. They were also paid in cash, the documents state.

One worker contended that before the trial that someone with the company threatened him in a phone call, according to documents.

"We will beat you up and things will get hard for you," the documents state.

Charan Electrical ultimately underpaid the workers by roughly $104,000, comptroller's investigators found.

The contractor will be required to pay nearly $201,000 with interest and the maximum civil penalty, officials said.