Marine engineering firm charged with fraud
Claim: Pembroke Park company submitted $375K in false invoices
A Pembroke Park marine engineering firm has been charged in federal criminal court with submitting a “materially false, fictitious and fraudulent” invoice in 2015 for $375,062 while it was contracted to replace channel marker range lights for the U.S. Coast Guard.
Few other details were in a felony charging document filed Aug. 29 in U.S. District Court in Miami, beyond the accusation that Shoreline Foundation Inc., which has completed marine work worth millions of dollars under federal contract in South Florida and elsewhere since 1986, fraudulently submitted the invoice “for performance in accordance with the specifications, terms, and conditions of its contract” with the U.S. Coast Guard.
The assistant U.S. attorney who filed the case, Jaime A. Raich, said by email that additional information about the charges is not publicly available but will be in about two weeks.
Reached by phone on Monday, Shoreline attorney Douglas Molloy, of the Fort Myers-based Molloy Law, said the company plans to take responsibility at an upcoming plea hearing for “mistakes” that actually amount to about $30,000 in damages.
A former employee of the firm committed the error in the “bidding and reporting process,” Molloy said.
He noted that the government allowed Shoreline vice president John McGee, as the company’s representative, to waive indictment and consent to prosecution by information.
“After the parties sat down and talked about what happened, they agreed this the best course of action as far as taking responsibility,” he said. But Molloy declined to identify the former employee who made the “mistake,” or to say why it was made or why the company didn’t settle the matter with the Coast Guard before it went to criminal court.
According to data accessed on the federal website USAspending.gov, Shoreline Foundation Inc. entered into a $2.86 million contract with the U.S. Coast Guard in 2013 to rebuild navigational guide lights at two channels – “Miami Main” and “Government Cut” – in Miami-Dade County. The website shows the company was paid $2.86 million at the beginning of the two-year contract term in July 2013. In February 2015, the company was paid $66,246 as part of a supplemental work agreement, then was debited $69,073 in August 2015, the site shows.
The offense carries a maximum penalty of $500,000 or twice the amount lost, according to the charging document.
Shoreline Foundation came under federal scrutiny several times during a seawall rebuilding project at the Port of Palm Beach after a 13-year employee fell into the interior of a barge and died from lack of oxygen in May 2013.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited the company with five violations in connection with the death, then cited the company with 33 violations following inspections at the site in December 2014 and January 2015.