Labor supplier pleads guilty to tax evasion in probe of LI building industry

[billyoc]

By Robert E. Kessler | [e-mail]
2:18 PM EDT, September 18, 2007

As part of an ongoing federal investigation into both tax evasion and the use of illegal immigrants in the home construction industry, a major supplier of carpenters for home building on Long Island pleaded guilty yesterday to evading federal income taxes by paying his workers in cash.

Gary Woltmann, the president of Woltmann Associates in Port Jefferson, was the second head of a business that supplies skilled carpenters for the framing of housing units to be arrested recently by agents of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service as part of the federal probe.

In July, Jay Kuhn, the head of Kuhn Brothers Construction of St. James, pleaded guilty to evading federal income taxes on money paid to carpenters, many of whom were illegal immigrants from Ecuador.

http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzbuild0919,0,4518353.story