A Florida contractor fined $50,000 for lying to OSHA to avoid safety violation citations
A Jacksonville-area contractor tried to avoid a proposed $199,178 in workplace safety fines by trying to fool an OSHA inspector that his company wasn’t the one working on the jobsite.
That’s in the guilty plea of Alcir DeSouza, a resident of St. Johns and owner of DeSouza Framing, a residential and commercial framing contracting company. DeSouza pleaded guilty to making false statements and was fined $50,000 in Jacksonville federal court.
That’s separate from the proposed fines for the two workplace safety violations, $99,589 for each violation. In October and December 2017, the U.S. Department of Labor said an inspector for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found DeSouza “willfully exposed employees to fall hazards by allowing them to work on roofs without fall protection systems.”
OSHA classified each violation at the home as “Willful,” defined by the agency as “a violation in which the employer either knowingly failed to comply with a legal requirement (purposeful disregard) or acted with plain indifference to employee safety.”
But when the OSHA inspector returned to the site on Dec. 20, 2017, DeSouza’s guilty plea says, a DeSouza Framing employee told told the inspector he worked for the company serving as DeSouza’s payroll company/leasing agent (“Company A” in court documents). DeSouza then tried to get the owner of Company A to back-sign a contract that would make it appear that Company A was the framing subcontractor, not DeSouza Framing.
DeSouza met with the OSHA inspector on Jan. 29, 2018, and said Company A was the framing contractor at the jobsite.
