construction company personnel

At any large construction project there is a construction trailer used by the construction superintendent and other personnel. It would be fairly easy to come up with a reason for a visit.

The problem with that is those guys are not usually going to know what's going on in the head office, unless one of them is also a bigwig in the company--in which case he isn't going to want to talk about such things.

If I were doing it I would try to find and befriend a secretary (or, as they like to be called, an administrative assistant), or perhaps the office manager (the office manager is going to deal with clerical, not construction). I just happen to have a "pretend daughter" who works for a large construction company as . . . an administrative assistant.

If I could find someone who smokes and/or likes to go to the bars, so much the better.

It's going to be a stretch any way you arrange this. Companies are very secretive about certain things, especially if they are doing something off the books. Only a few people will know the real story.

It wouldn't take much to figure out who a weak link in any company might be -- for example an office employee who hangs out in a local bar and who might be susceptible to some drinks and flirting or even a bribe. Get them talking and find out who the bookkeeper is, and then hire a PI (or even have your protags do some sleuthing) to get something on the bookkeeper that they can hint might be exposed if the bookkeeper doesn't cooperate with them. Depends on how shady your protags can get and the tone of the story -- I've read books that were comical murder mysteries where the protag breaks into someone's office and steals their computer info, or whatever and for whatever reason, the reader is not expected to question the ethics of this.

I had a client who run a construction business. Five different companies that I knew of, probably seven or eight sets of books, and even the guy's wife didn't know everything. Not sure I did either, and sometimes I had my doubt about the guy knowing everything he was doing.

I had a bankruptcy trustee trying to sort this whole mess out, with two of the companies declaring bankruptcy. Trustee wanted to grab anything he could. My client wanted to keep everything he could.

As Alleycat says, this stuff is secretive, and has the potential to land people in jail. Your investigator is unlikely to find anything real juicy, so just make it simple. I would go with a disgruntled supervisor.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

What sort of personnel/payroll problems? If it would affect the workers, it might be worth getting a job on-site. 'The new guy' is in an excellent position to ask his co-workers about how paycheques are handled, how things are done, what to look out for. Indeed, depending on the problem, just having a trained eye look over a paycheque might be instructive.
My sister once worked for a swine who under-deducted the income tax. It make the pitiful paycheques look larger, and when the employees were hit by a big income tax payment, it was "Oops!"
I imagine anyone with accounting skills would pick up on stuff like that. Or fake employees.

If it's a company that hires union workers, it's really tough for anything hinky to go on in payroll because the union will be watching everything.

Depending on the size of the company, yes there could be shady stuff in payroll, and yes in a small enough company anyone who sees the books might notice it and know about it, but it would have to be a very small company and the person looking would have to know what they're seeing. Have you ever seen the paperwork associated with payroll?? It's gobbledygook if you don't know what you're looking at. You couldn't just spend five minutes in someone's office and suddenly know that they've been running two sets of books.

Where I work (mid-sized construction company) the closest the site will ever get to payroll is filling out timesheets. They code the hours to the work and send them in. Payroll gets them, project manager gets them, and coordinator/engineer gets them (first one to pay the workers, last two to do cost control and make sure everything is coded properly and tracking within budget). After that, the super and site engineer will have nothing at all to do with payroll.

A certain amount of "horse trading" as I've heard it called, goes on on site between the superintendants of the general and the various trades, but it's usually just so they can avoid dealing with the paperwork. Carpenters do the layout wrong, so the electricians have to do a bit of rework... instead of paying for the rework, the carpenters build an enclosure that the electricians would have had to order/build themselves the next month... that kind of thing.

Construction can be a marginal business at times, particularly since it has such a reputation for being run by "legitimate business men". The latest big thing is 'cost plus', in which we hand over our books for the project (every purchase, every timesheet, every subcontract) and get the cost of that plus an agreed mark up. Really kinda tough to do anything screwy with the cash flow in those conditions.

lexxi said:

Thanks, all.

I said "antagonist" but this is really a red herring subplot.

The important thing is that the daughter of the construction company owner has been running things in her dad's semi-retirement, or a branch of the business, and she has been hiring a number of illegal aliens and providing false documentation. I don't necessarily need my protagonists to figure out the exact details -- just to confirm that the daughter does have something to hide and incidentally learn that an employee (electrician) that they had assumed was American born may not be after all.

Click to expand...

Who processes the payroll? A payroll clerk and tell all sorts of things from the times, etc., and the income tax withholding forms would have been handed to that clerk.

If a licensed electrician is fake, then it will be discovered readily, because they would need copies of licenses on file in the human resources department. All those licenses have to be available for every job a licensed tradesperson is on.

I won't say how I know this, but a company who hires illegal aliens (so they can pay them less) probably has a resource for getting them fake IDs and papers. It's not hard at all.

The easiest person to query is the guy who got fired. Though in Florida, you can ask anyone in construction about anyone else, even if they don't work for them, and they'll know a lot of dirt. Workers here switch contractors for a nickel more an hour or because the job is closer to home. Casual labor is less reliable and less plugged in, but masonry/stucco laborers seem to know everything. You have to speak Spanish though...

Jeff

You say "Then he earned the electrician's license under that fake identity." Is he qualified to be an electrician? Can he do the job to the expected standard? Because the daughter can get him all the fake papers in the world, and he can have licenses on file everywhere, but if he can't do the job, the other tradesmen working with him will notice. Even the non-electricians, if they've got any experience, they've seen electricians work, and they've seen what that work looks like.
And if he got the job that someone else wanted, for themselves or a buddy, they'll talk. Maybe not complain to the boss, but certainly griping among themselves. If they find a sympathetic listener, they might open up. Get them off-site and give them beer - they will talk. Animosity is a wonderful thing.