The Orange County Register reports that 4 people were charged with a total of 144 felony charges stemming from a multimillion-dollar workers’ compensation insurance fraud case.

Joseph Perry Soares, 47, Kimberly Jane Soares, 43, James Gregory Campbell, 59, and his son, Robert Scott Campbell, 26, are charged with conspiracy, perjury, grand theft, forgery, identity theft, misrepresenting facts to the State Compensation Insurance Fund, recording false and forged documents, making fraudulent statements, making false statements to discourage workers from claiming benefits and income tax fraud.

The Soares’ are the owners of a company called Democo, Inc. located in Orange. James Campbell is the general manager of the company. The stand accused of failing to secure worker’s compensation insurance for dozens of employees while falsely claiming that Democo only employed one full-time and one part-time clerical employee. They would provided false information to state agencies in order to receive a certificate showing Democo had workers’ compensation insurance allowing them to obtain work contracts. In addition, they claimed that demolitionists that worked for Democo were subcontractors in order to avoid paying for insurance for them. Employees were also discouraged from filing workers’ compensation claims.

All told, the four defendants failed to pay $5.7 million dollars in workers’ compensation premiums over an eight year period. The Soares’ are also accused of cheating the IRS out of $6.4 million by filing false tax returns.

The Soares’ appeared in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana today and plead not guilty to all charges. The case was set for a pretrial hearing on May 15. All defendants are being held in lieu of $2.5 million bail and face up to 91 years in prison.

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Tags: 144 felony charges, Democo, Inc., james gregory campbell, joseph perry soares, kimberly soares, multimillion dollar fraud, orange county workers' compensation fraud, robert scott campbell, Workers' compensation fraud

This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Insurance Fraud. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.