During the recent meeting between Governor Paterson and select Upstate newspaper editors, the Governor made a remark about unions that caught my attention. He described his frustration negotiating with public employee unions and then left the open ended question “What do you suggest I do to balance the budget?” I work for unionized construction workers, not public employee unions, but I do have a suggestion on how to balance the budget- Let's make contractors that cheat the system pay their fair share.

New York looses over $4 billion annually due to employees being wrongly classified as independent contractors according to a recent Cornell study. Some contractors put it right in their business plan to take employees off their books and make them work under a 1099. By doing this, the contractor can avoid paying into workman's compensation, Medicaid, or unemployment insurance (a felony). They don't have to worry about minimum wage or overtime, and neither the employee nor employer has to pay into social security.

Good for them, perhaps, but bad for taxpayers. People that play by the rules (which include public employees, incidentally) have to take up the slack for these unscrupulous contractors through higher taxes and cuts in services. Make no mistake, if these crooks were paying their taxes, New York wouldn't have these budget problems.

Let's remember, the governor is responsible for law enforcement, not the legislature, and under his purview is the New York State Misclassified Workers Task Force, whose job it is to coordinate the various agencies responsible for enforcement and prosecution of misclassified workers. They do yeomen's work, uncovering 12,300 incidents of employee misclassification and over $157 Million in unreported payments in 2008 alone. They could do more, and if we really want to get serious about solving our budget problems, the governor should make their work a priority. I think we can all agree that we could use more revenue and fewer dirty contractors in this state.

The Governor is on the right track when he looks for pragmatic solutions, but before we start targeting people that play by the rules because they are easy to find, let's put a little more effort into finding the people that don't. Everyone complains about taxes, but if these crooked contractors were actually paying them, maybe there would be less to complain about.