A Florida man was sentenced on February 20 to 48 months in prison and ordered to forfeit more than $5.5 million to the United States as well as forfeit numerous real properties and cash, and to pay over $55 million in restitution for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States and willful violation of a workplace standard that resulted in the death of his employee following a joint agency investigation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Manual Domingos Pita of Wesley Chapel previously pleaded guilty to those charges on July 9, 2024.
According to court documents, Pita owned and operated Domingos 54 Construction, a subcontracting business for the wood framing of new construction homes.
Domingos 54 was a shell construction company that Pita used to provide workers, including undocumented aliens, with construction jobs.
However, Pita failed to secure the required workers’ compensation insurance coverage for these employees by falsifying in worker’s compensation insurance applications the number of workers for which he sought coverage.
In addition, Pita failed to pay any federal employment taxes on the wages these workers earned during the scheme between 2018 and 2022.
As a result, Pita caused several worker’s compensation insurance companies to sustain a loss of over $22.7 million in premiums they could have charged had they been aware of the number of workers they had been manipulated into covering with their policies.
In addition, Pita failed to pay the IRS over $33.7 million in federal employment taxes on those workers’ wages.
Between February and July 2019, investigators with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued six citations to Domingos 54 for failure to provide fall protection to workers.
Even after being cited for these violations, Pita continued to ignore OSHA requirements. In March 2020, Pita assigned a worker and three other carpenters to install sheeting on the roof of a residential home in windy conditions without providing the required fall-protection gear or ensuring its use. As a result, one of the workers was blown off the roof and died from his injuries.
