Four Builders, Four License Applications, and Certificates Nassau Says Were Altered

The Nassau County District Attorney's office announced on September 4 that four men had been charged over the paperwork they filed to get a home improvement license. The document at the center of all four cases is one that every business on Long Island handles and almost nobody checks: a certificate of workers' compensation insurance.

According to the announcement, the four applications were filed with the Nassau County Department of Consumer Affairs between June 2025 and March 2026, and each carried a certificate that had been altered. The alterations named in the charges are the ordinary ones: an expiration date moved forward, a policy number that does not match the policy, coverage that did not exist at all. All four applications were denied.

The men charged are Fabio Salazar, 52, of Maspeth, in connection with Always First Restoration LLC of Queens; Michael Kaffash, 40, of Woodmere, in connection with Kingspoint Builders LLC of Hempstead; Jonathan Mendel, 45, of Cedarhurst, in connection with JRM Development LLC of Lawrence; and James Fernandes, 39, of Carle Place, in connection with Braga Industries Inc. of Carle Place. The counts include criminal possession of a forged instrument in the second degree, a class D felony, and offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree, a class E felony, along with a misdemeanor charge of failing to secure compensation coverage. Charges are accusations. None of the four has been convicted and each is entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Why the certificate is the weak point

A certificate of insurance is not the insurance. It is a one page summary that a broker generates to describe a policy, and in ordinary commercial practice it arrives as an emailed PDF from the contractor who is asking you for work. Nothing about receiving it puts you in contact with the carrier. Nothing about reading it tells you whether the policy behind it was cancelled the week after the certificate was issued, which happens routinely and for the most mundane reason, a missed premium payment.

Nassau County catches these at a licensing counter because the county requires proof of coverage before it will issue a home improvement license, and somebody there compares the certificate against the underlying policy. A business hiring a subcontractor has no licensing counter. It has a folder.

What an uninsured sub costs the business that hired them

New York does not treat a general contractor's insurance obligations as ending at its own payroll. If a subcontractor carries no workers' compensation coverage and one of that subcontractor's employees is hurt on your site, the claim does not simply disappear into the subcontractor's empty balance sheet. It moves up. The Workers' Compensation Board has a process for uninsured employers, the state can assess penalties against the uninsured business, and the injured worker's claim frequently lands on the policy of the contractor above them. On construction work the exposure is wider still, because New York's Labor Law places responsibility for certain height related injuries on owners and general contractors regardless of who was actually careless.

The practical consequence is that a forged certificate is not primarily a fraud against the county. It is a fraud against whoever relied on it, and on a construction site that is usually the business that let the crew through the gate.

The other half of the announcement is money already recovered

The same release put a number on what the office's labor unit has returned this year: close to $650,000 to 138 workers in Nassau County. The individual cases behind that total describe the shapes wage cases take here.

The largest is also the oldest. Richard Scores, the owner of Westbury Fish, pleaded guilty in January 2017 to offering a false instrument for filing and to failing to pay wages, and was ordered to make restitution to 38 employees plus nearly $24,000 in unpaid unemployment insurance contributions to the state. He paid none of it for eight years. In June 2026 the office moved against his assets and recovered more than $435,000.

The rest are smaller and more recent. In June, more than $60,000 went to 30 workers who had not been paid time and a half on overtime hours, and $35,000 went to 25 employees paid below the prevailing wage rate on public work. In January, a renovation contractor was ordered to pay $81,592 in prevailing wages to more than 40 employees who worked on school projects in the Merrick and Oceanside districts between 2019 and 2021.

Six agencies appear in the release as partners, which tells you how these cases are actually built: the county's consumer affairs department, the state's workers' compensation fraud inspector general, the Department of Financial Services, the state and federal labor departments, and the New York State Insurance Fund. A payroll filing, an insurance record and a license application sit in three different systems, and cases begin when two of them disagree.

What it means for members

Stop accepting a certificate of insurance as proof of anything. Before the next subcontractor starts work, verify coverage at the source: run the business through the New York State Workers' Compensation Board's public coverage search, or call the carrier's number and confirm the policy is in force today rather than on the date printed on the paper. It takes a few minutes per sub, and it is the only step in the process that touches an authority other than the person asking you for the job.

Then look at the second half of that release again, because prevailing wage and overtime are where the recovered money mostly came from. If your company does public work, or classifies anyone as exempt from overtime, the enforcement partnership described here already has your NYS-45 filings, and it is comparing them to something.