Indeed, it's no surprise to anyone who's ever been to a car wash that often car washes have hired illegal aliens the past. And it's obviously no doubt to the regulators in the State of California who had just fined many car washes hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid employment contributions, as they were paying illegal aliens under the table. Not long ago, I talked to a friend of mine who did payroll accounting for local small businesses in our town.
Indeed, I had mentioned to her that I was previously in the car wash business before retiring, and she said she had a couple of car wash accounts, and we got to talking about how she could be implicated if a car wash which she did business with was giving her false information, or paying illegal aliens under the table. She told me, that if they were lying to her she had nothing to worry about, and she already suspected that they were in some cases.
"Well," I told her, "if they are and you know about it, and you don't call it in as a whistleblower, you are in fact enabling a crime, and in this state [CA] you know that they need the money, so they are going to continue to go after these car washes that violate the law." She was bothered by the fact that she might get in trouble merely because of one of her good paying customers was cheating the state out of unemployment withholding, etc, or not paying the required workers compensation insurance to their employees.
If you run a small accounting business, and you also handle payroll accounting for those small businesses who are your clientele and customers, you should be thinking about this, because it is a rather serious issue. The other day we were talking about the car wash industry, but it could be just about any industry that uses lots of illegal alien labor such as the landscaping profession, or small contractors. So please consider all this and don't get yourself in trouble.
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