Contractor handling $148M payrolls admits trying to cheat IRS, insurers

November 21, 2025

An immigrant building contractor with a grade-school education has admitted overseeing a far-flung scam that shielded nearly $150 million in construction payrolls from insurance and tax obligations.

Rene Mauricio Escobar, 55, pleaded guilty in Jacksonville’s federal court to conspiring to commit wire fraud and conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service, charges that together can carry a prison sentence as long as 25 years.

The case continues a years-long string of prosecutions targeting contractors involved in cheating the IRS and workers’ compensation insurers by lying about the number of tradesmen performing jobs.

Escobar’s scam involved “hundreds of construction contractors, mostly made up of undocumented aliens,” who used paperwork from Escobar’s plastering business to be hired at construction sites, according to a summary of case facts filed at the plea hearing.

That filing described the goal of the arrangement as being first “to facilitate the employment of workers who were not legally authorized to work in the United States,” then to avoid costs of workers’ comp insurance and payroll taxes. 

Escobar lives in Orlando but the case involved tradesmen at jobsites around the state, including in Jacksonville, Assistant U.S. Attorney Arnold Corsmeier said. A U.S. citizen for many years, Escobar was born in El Salvador and told U.S. Magistrate Judge Samuel Horovitz he left school in the fourth grade because he had to work to provide for his siblings.

State law requires construction workers to be protected by workers’ comp insurance to be employed, and the filing said Escobar and his wife, Juana, took out insurance for “a handful of employees and a minimal payroll” at Escobar Plastering, referred to in the filing as EP.

“They then reached agreements with hundreds of construction subcontractors …  to represent to construction contractors that the subcontractors were employed by EP,” the document said, although insurers weren’t told about those workers.

“The subcontractors provided the conspirators with the names of the contractors for which they wanted to perform work and the conspirators sent the contractors COIs,” certificates of insurance that said the tradesmen were employees of Escobar’s plastering business, according to the document.

Employers in Florida also have to verify their employees are legally allowed to hold jobs, which excludes illegal immigrants.

Instead of hiring the subs directly ― and taking responsibility for workers’ immigration status as well as insurance ― contractors sent payroll checks to Escobar’s business, which deducted a 7% or 8% fee and passed the rest on to the workers.

Between 2015 and August 2024, the plastering business handled about $148.8 million in payrolls, keeping $10.4 million in fees, the court filing by the prosecution said.

For payrolls that large, insurance companies would have charged roughly $14.9 million extra in workers’ comp premiums, said the filing.

The document also said the plastering business failed to pay payroll taxes that were due for the hundreds of subs working under Escobar’s insurance certificates. An early version of the filing said that payroll taxes on $148.8 million would have totaled about $37.2 million, but that was scratched through and the final amount owed wasn’t specified.  

Escobar’s plea resolves charges against the last of five people indicted simultaneously in Orlando in August 2024 in cases that involved payrolls collectively totaling $292 million.

Escobar’s wife hasn’t been sentenced yet but the other three people, charged in a separate indictment, were sentenced in July to time behind bars ranging from 18 months to 57 months and ordered to pay about $37.4 million in restitution, according to court records.