Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Orkin Pest Control Employees Hosted Pizza Parties To Forge Customer Signatures

The Orkin Man

We've reported on a lot of outrages in the almost five years that we've been writing a blog on justice issues. But perhaps our most outrageous post came last week when we reported that employees for Orkin Pest Control had hosted pizza parties to forge customer signatures on termite inspections that had not been performed.

Why is this so appalling? Well, for one, termite control is a pretty important topic for most homeowners. If an inspection is not performed properly, your house can be eaten out from underneath you--and you are blissfully unaware of a problem until it's too late. Two, it takes some grotesquely cynical minds to turn an act of blatant fraud into the theme for a party.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise when you consider that the parent company for Orkin is Atlanta-based Rollins Inc. That firm is run by the family that produced Ted Rollins, the CEO of Campus Crest Communities and a central figure in a dubious Alabama divorce case that left his ex wife and two daughters on food stamps.

We've already shown that Ted Rollins and his company have a proclivity for falsifying documents. Now we learn that the company headed by his billionaire cousins, Randall and Gary Rollins, engages in similar behavior. Is this some sort of nasty family trait that is passed down through the generations? Let's consider what we know about Ted Rollins:

* In his divorce from Sherry Rollins, he signed a child-support affidavit, under penalty of perjury, stating that he made roughly $50,000 a year. That was listed as his only income, even though he was a principal in at least two major business ventures and had the use of three private jet craft;

* In a discrimination lawsuit, former Campus Crest employee Heather McCormack said a company executive asked her to falsify an apartment-occupancy report in connection with the sale of the property to a major investor, Harrison Street Real Estate of Chicago. In other words, Ted Rollins' company tried to defraud one of its own investors.

That leads us to the Orkin pizza parties, which would be a funny story--if it wasn't so sad. Here is how a Florida man named Jack Cox described the parties for a series of articles about Orkin by John F. Sugg, of the Atlanta alternative weekly Creative Loafing:

Cox, a former Orkin inspector in Tampa, was asked during a deposition in 2001 if he had ever forged customers' signatures to re-inspection tickets, meaning the homes hadn't been scoped for termites and were vulnerable -- or, perhaps, were about ready to collapse from termite damage. 
Cox pondered the number of forgeries he had committed, and concluded that "if you do a hundred a month, that's 1,200 a year. So it might be over 1,000. ... In fact, we've had parties, kind of like a party, sat down, and all of us sat down in a room and did them." Often, according to court documents, pizzas were served as Orkin employees industriously forged their trusting clients' signatures to stacks of documents, giving a special and well-known meaning to the term "pizza party" within the company.

No wonder Randall and Gary Rollins are billionaires. It must be easy to rake in big bucks when you charge customers for work that is not performed. It looks like Ted Rollins is employing a similar business "strategy" with Campus Crest Communities.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I thought it only rumor when it said we in the U.S. had to have no less than ten (10) million dollars to live in the times of globalism's one world government ideology.

I did not believe it.

Now, I do.

Moreover, the billionaire class, that was to be the new people of America - primarily.

Of course then the obvious, levels of classes underneath the classless that can rape, pillage, plunder and cannibalize by whatever methodology conceived.

I believe the ago old saying: healthy shame keeps us from thinking we're "God."

Healthy shame is the sunshine law and Legal Schnauzer, you should be paid that ten (10) million dollars because you have shined the beacon light on the problem and therefore, a solution can begin?!

How do we people in a majority thrive, and not just a few?

By becoming men in black to control the bugs and the bugs' controllers.

Ted Rollins must refund every real penny he stole for the practice that was made standard by the Karl Rove insect species.

The poly-addicted druggies and other boundary-less Congressional politicians hold the ideology that to not be a billionaire in this time of new world order, GREEN Agenda 21 is the extermination party to share pizza, too.

These bug species think carefully how to prepare the population, we get to see Hollywood films made for the masses to be hypnotized by the so-called "money."

When do we get tired enough to make a real change?

Roberta

legalschnauzer said...

Perhaps the most disturbing part of this story to me is that pizza parties probably are paid for by the company. And that means someone in management knew what was going on. This doesn't sound like a few rogue employees who were doing this at lower levels. I suspect this was done with knowledge of folks who were pretty high up the food chain.

Robby Scott Hill said...

Meals and lodging provided for the convenience of the employer are generally not taxable to the employee & may provide a tax deduction for the employer.

However, the diligent law student will know all the exceptions to the general rule of law. When the meals and lodging are provided for the purpose of engaging in an illegal activity, the employer's tax deduction is not allowable. If someone with authority such as a company officer or attorney were present, then conspiracy and racketeering come into the picture as well. Even if no criminal charges are filed, the government still has a nice civil case to recover unpaid taxes from the improperly claimed tax deductions, if any.

Some enterprising young federal prosecutor should take my advice and run with it :)

Budget cuts are forcing many a young Assistant US Attorney/State Attorney General into the unemployment line. This blog has the information they need to deal themselves back into the game.

legalschnauzer said...

Very interesting, Rob. Are you saying the IRS should take a look at Orkin and Rollins Inc.?

jeffrey spruill said...

So Uncle Ted Rollins cousins engaged in robosigning too?

Wonder if that was where BofA & other bankster criminals got the idea from?

http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/blog/bank_notes/2012/03/feds-confirm-robosigning-at-bank-of.html

legalschnauzer said...

Jeff:
I guess Orkin/Rollins did engage in a form of robosigning. Actually, I guess Rollins' actions were worse than those of BofA, etc. Sounds like robosigning is signing a document without verifying that it is accurate. Orkin/Rollins held pizza parties to forge signatures on documents that they knew were not accurate.

The Florida AG filed a civil RICO claim against Orkin/Rollins, which was settled in 2010. Not quite sure how a few managers managed to escape prison. This sounds like criminal activity to me.

If I get caught walking into a bank and forging someone's name on a check, I'm pretty sure I get arrested. The same legal principle would seem to apply here.

Robby Scott Hill said...

I'm saying it's going to take more than the usual federal agents who are more preoccupied with investigating the enemies of the Oval Office than protecting the taxpayers. It's going to take a private law office with accountants & tax professionals on staff to sue with RICO & False Claims Act.