Minnesota construction subcontractor charged with shortchanging employees $241,000

A Minnesota woman knowingly shorted her employees nearly $242,000, according to charges filed in Hennepin County district court last week.

Over the course of about two and a half years, Laura Lee Plzak, 53, allegedly failed to pay her employees at subcontractor Honda Electric the acceptable wages for state and federally-funded construction projects -- an offense that amounts to five counts of felony theft-by-swindle.

Following a Minnesota Department of Transportation investigation, Plzak confessed that her company in Loretto, Minn. had failed to comply with statute-assigned wages for those who worked on state or federally funded construction projects since 2010.

According to Minnesota law, contractors and sub-contractors have to pay their workers a wage that is close to the amount others make for similar work in the county where the project is located. The state's Department of Labor and Industry calculates the wages, called the prevailing wage. The amounts vary based on the type of work someone does, but the majority of the calculations for the total rates fall between $40 and $60 per hour.

Plzak had allegedly paid some of her employees less than half the prevailing wage for their work.

According to the complaint, written by David Kukura, a special agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the U.S. Justice Department:

MNDOT opened an investigation into Honda Electric in October 2010 and later received a complaint from a former employee who said he had worked on a construction project for the company. The employee said he received $17 per hour when the prevailing hourly wage for his electrical work was $58.50.

Agents also found that time sheets provided by the company for other workers on the same project were false. All had the same handwriting, though they were for different employees.

A different employee recorded a call between she and Plzak and asked Plzak why her pay stub showed that she made $42 per hour when she had actually made $10 or $12 per hour. "Don't you think that's fair?" Plzak asked the worker.

"[Plzak] said that she hoped [the employee] would not stir up trouble for [she] and her husband," Kukura wrote in the compliant.

Subcontractors like Honda are required to file reports that demonstrate their compliance with prevailing wage requirements. Plzak confessed to Kukura that she would divide each worker's actual gross pay by the amount they should have been making in order to determine the number of hours she would report.

The two employees, along with other information, prompted agents from MNDOT and the FBI to obtain more time sheets, many of which contained handwritten notations that indicated someone had been calculating how many hours each employee would have to work to receive the same gross pay if they were making the prevailing wage.

The maximum sentence for four of the five felony level theft-by-swindle charges against Plzak is 20 years in prison and up to $100,000 in fines. There is no court date set yet.

In 2006, Plzak was found to have withheld $15,800 in overtime wages, according to court documents. Plzak could not be reached for comment Thursday afternoon.

Plzak's husband, Jeffrey Plzak, runs Honda Electric with her as an electrician and worked at job sites while Laura worked from the office. Jeffrey Plzak was sentenced to 22 months in prison earlier this month, according to a news release from the Hennepin County attorney's office.

Anne Millerbernd is a University of Minnesota student on assignment for the Star Tribune.