A 35-year-old Apopka woman was sentenced to over three years behind bars for hiring undocumented aliens and defrauding the federal government out of payroll taxes.
Mayra Velasquez was sentenced to three years and five months in federal prison by U.S. Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle on Wednesday, April 26, after pleading guilty last year to committing wire fraud and conspiring to defraud the United States and Internal Revenue Service. As part of her sentence, Velasquez must also forfeit $600,752 and three properties in Polk County that were used in the conspiracies.
According to court records, Velasquez owned and managed a construction company that claimed it supplied services and labor for various contractors and subcontractors. Velasquez was required to secure and maintain adequate worker’s compensation insurance coverage in order to comply with Florida law.
Although Velasquez purported these workers to be employees, they were often undocumented aliens who were actually working off the books.
As a result, her company did not ensure that the workers were legally authorized to work in the United States and evaded laws that required payment of state and federal payroll taxes on behalf of these workers. Velasquez’s company did not collect or remit any payroll taxes to the U.S. Additionally, the contractors who paid these workers and used their services were able to avoid responsibility for payroll taxes as well.
In total, Velasquez was responsible for approximately $1.769 million in unpaid payroll taxes.
Velasquez fraudulently represented on insurance applications that her company had a very limited payroll and a very limited number of employees who work on construction job sites. She also sent false wire communications to multiple contractors that her company’s employees had full worker’s compensation coverage when they did not.
Authorities say that in reality, Velasquez received and cashed more than $7 million in checks from various construction contractors for the undocumented aliens that worked for her. The payroll figures “far exceeded the very limited payroll figures that Velasquez had reported to her worker’s compensation insurance company,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The employees performed work at sites without adequate insurance coverage and the insurance companies that dealt with Velasquez lost premiums that they would have charged had they been aware of the true number of workers their policies were being manipulated to cover.
The government estimates the loss to those insurers was almost $750,000 in insurance premiums that were not paid.