Daily News (New York), February 11, 2008, Monday

Copyright 2008 Daily News, L.P.

Daily News (New York)

February 11, 2008, Monday

SPORTS FINAL EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. 28

HEADLINE: GET THE JOB DONE

BODY:

Four months into a long-overdue crackdown on scofflaw employers who hire workers off the books, the Spitzer administration today reports, "We have not yet begun to scratch the surface."

They've got that right.

Thousands of New York businesses are dodging their fair share of taxes and insurance costs by paying employees under the table or falsely labeling them as independent contractors.

These chiselers are a plague on the state's economy. They cheat workers out of pay and benefits, shortchange government programs and put their law-abiding competitors at an unfair disadvantage.

And the majority of these bad actors have gone undetected and unpunished, thanks to lax enforcement that let a culture of cheating flourish. Gov. Spitzer inherited the mess, and it falls to him to clean it up.

According to today's report, labor regulators, tax collectors and law enforcement agents have staged 16 workplace sweeps. They've turned up 2,078 off-the-books workers, $19 million in unreported wages and $856,000 in unpaid premiums for unemployment insurance.

Spitzer must now shift the effort into higher gear in an all-out drive to restore respect for state labor laws.

The key is convincing rogue employers that cheating is no longer worth the risk. That means providing money and manpower for investigations and levying tougher penalties against those who get caught.

Cornell University's Industrial and Labor Relations School analyzed Labor Department audits last year and found, on average, that firms were improperly hiding one out of every 10 employees from the government.

That astounding figure potentially translates into hundreds of thousands of workers operating off the radar screen and vulnerable to exploitation - not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars in uncollected taxes and payments for unemployment insurance and workers' compensation.

The people hardest hit by these abuses are working men and women struggling to maintain a decent standard of living. Rigorously enforcing basic labor protections is the least the state can do for them.

LOAD-DATE: February 11, 2008