If you like sausage, you should not use GPS or check your state CU scrap copper sales

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ITO

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Texas
Over the past year there have been some major changes in Texas state law regarding copper. The way I understand the how all this came about had something to do with homeless people living under some bridge on the interstate somewhere around Dallas, and one day after taking a break from panhandling they noted there were conduits under the overpass and thought maybe it they could get some copper that they could sell it as scrap for some easy beer money. Never mind that cutting into GRC under a bridge to steal copper has got to be a lot harder than actually just getting a job, they managed to cut the conduit only to find it was full of fiber instead of copper. In fact this fiber belonged to Time Warner and they managed to cut a significant portion of the phone service to a large portion of Dallas for almost an entire business day.

Story- http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA6466200.html

Time Warner responded by putting a $10,000 bounty on there heads AND got together with AT&T, SBC, and Verizon to sick their lobbyist on our state legislators to change the laws, and sure enough no sooner had the very next legislative session passed we had a new law on the books. Any sale of stolen scrap copper wire (plumbing pipe is not included) is a class f felony punishable by stiff fines and jail time. Also in Texas you can be stripped of any professional license if you have a felony on your record, so not only could a copper thief go to jail, he could lose his electrical license.

Then almost overnight there is a statewide database run by DPS to track all scrap copper sales made to salvage yards in the State of Texas, as well as an actual task force in my city that runs sting operations to make sure the salvage yards are playing by the rules, and to follow up on suspicious copper sales. The scrap yards were already by law required to document, TXDL, license plate number, date, and the condition of the copper that was bought. Example: Joe Smith, TX DL 123456789, White Chevy LIC- 123-ABC, Scrap copper still on spools unused wrapped in plastic, or scrap copper insulation burned off (against the law), or scrap copper hand stripped, or scrap copper wire un-stripped.

Not all scrap yards follow the law so our local law enforcement does sting operations to see if they are documenting every sale properly and if they do not they get a fat fine or shut down for short period of time. For the ones that do follow the law our local task force has a criteria they look for to do investigations of copper sales. For instance spools of unused copper, certain size sales, or burned off insulation (since its illegal) will trigger an investigation. The person who made the suspicious sell has access to copper and from where, or if it?s a women who does she live with or what family she may have that has access to copper. They follow the ?rabbit? down the hole to see who it lives with.

That's when I got my phone call...
 
This is when I go my phone call from a local police detective; the conversation went something like this:

Caller: This is Detective Dano with the local PD, may I speak to Mr. Ito.
Me: This is Mr Ito.
Caller: Are you the owner of ITO electric?
Me: Yes
Caller: This may be an awkward question but we are doing and investigation and it would help us a great deal if you could tell us whether or not you plan on going out of business any time soon, or have some other need to liquidate your assets.
Me: What? NO!
Caller: Could you tell us why you would be selling un-used spools of copper still wrapped in plastic?
Me: I’m am not aware I was doing that.
Caller: Could you tell us whether or not John Smith or his wife is authorized to sell scrap copper for your company?
….. You can probably see where all this was going.

So I gave the good detective a list of all my employees, their DL numbers, home address, personal license plate numbers, and they checked it against the DPS data base for scrap sales. The reports I got back literally made me sick to my stomach. At first they were bad but over time as the detectives did their work it got worse and worse.

We all know what rabbit is, and the idea of giving the scrap #12 to apprentices to help them get by really sounds great but the old proverb of giving and inch of #12 and being taken for a mile really hit home and it somehow got turned into an entitlement for everyone. This all started out as scraps that at one time were not worth even picking up, to scraps of bigger pulls were not worth sending back to the shop, to cuts being ordered a little longer to anything less than 50’ is considered scrap to half rolls of #6 and #4 being considered scrap, to whole rolls of unused wire left over after the job was done being sold at the salvage yard. It all added up, to about $74,000 (30,000 lbs) worth over the last 16 months, and that was only the part that was reported, the police said I could probably double that number because not all scrap yards were complying with the law and ones that were, were not doing it every time.

...out of time more later
 
Sorry to hear that you can't trust your employees and how they violated your trust.

Sounds like time to clean house and talk to a lawyer about charges against the former employees.
 
It is a shame it has come to this with the state involvement and worse you employees lack of ethics.

I went through a similar thing though I caught them, cutting lengths off new rolls and skinning it on company time.
 
There was (is maybe) a time in my life when I pretty much thought the same thing about police states and BS laws. However after becoming El Hefe, a lot of what I used to think has changed. One axiom I clearly see now is that for every law, rule, policy or freedom that we lose there is always one guy who did something to make that rule necessary. I bet a lot of us can look at any company policies, law or set of rules and easily imagine why it had to be defined in print and made a rule.

Back to my story?

At first I wanted confront the thieves but thought better of it. Nothing good would come from it, because most people wont admit they are wrong and then I would have to listen to all the lies about how they thought it was ok or had all been saving 185,000 lbs of rabbit for many years and carried all by hand in the snow to a salvage yard miles away over a 12 month period or how they were doing demo work on the weekend to make ends meet, or some other BS. I did confront, publically humiliate, press charges, notify the IRS and made a big example out of the one guy selling the full un-used spools out of my warehouse. That felt pretty good and word got around fast about the new way to track copper sales; things got weird fast with some of my guys who knew they were on the list and felt like they had to tell me something in effort to find out what I knew and their lies about saving rabbit for years bla bla bla?

The truth is I did not have a clearly written and signed policies in place that emphatically stated what my company policy on scrap copper is. The one guy I could go after was selling new copper, and is therefore theft but all the scrap was?scrap. So what would be the point in going after someone that ultimately could (and would) argue they thought it was ok because after all at this point it had become an entitlement and they had been dong it for year? See? This is where somebody does something that using common sense we all think we agree on as being wrong but because there is no written policy it becomes legally gray. So we make new rule, a new policy and stoop to clearly defining common sense to people who probably already know what is right or wrong, as they pretend they were right in the first place, even though we all know they were wrong, but the new rule allows them to save face accept the new rule and agree with your ?new position? and therefore be right.

So I put a very clear policy in place for copper and emphatically in writing put an end to anyone receiving rabbit and still being right. Things are still a big awkward and I don?t like sausage any more.

More?
 
ITO said:
This is when I go my phone call from a local police detective; the conversation went something like this:

It all added up, to about $74,000 (30,000 lbs) worth over the last 16 months, and that was only the part that was reported, the police said I could probably double that number because not all scrap yards were complying with the law and ones that were, were not doing it every time.

...out of time more later
Click to expand...

aside from the fact that you now cannot trust your employees......
that's the worst aspect of this. how do you run a buisness when
you cannot trust the people who are operating it?

... it poisons the well.... how can you trust them on *anything*?
with tools on the jobsite, with change orders for the customer
being done on the side, and it's all gonna come out in the open.
as bad as the loss of the wire is, the disruption of your ongoing
work is worse.

one thing i'd make sure, is to have the police assign a solid value
to the wire loss estimation, and to make sure the police report of
the loss is in a form you can use with the IRS, so you can deduct
it as a loss on your taxes. having a good audit on that will at least
save you the tax on the money.

i was working for a very large contractor at one point, and doing
detailing on an overtime job for T&M, with over a hundred guys
doing 60 hour weeks, on a 60 day timeline, and material was a
problem. you couldn't find anything on the job.... so i built a
spreadsheet, and loaded all the invoices onto it. many of them were
hand written, which i found odd on a job this size, so i wrote a macro
to print out a list of everything that had been ordered, charged to
the customer, and never made it to the jobsite.

i ran the macro, printed out the list, and it probably amounted to
a quarter of a million dollars over six weeks. 10 rolls of 500 MCM
copper, switchgear..... i showed it to the GF, and he turned white
as a sheet.

then, it became necessary for retasking, and i ended up going off
to do other work, and the audit never continued.......


randy
 
Oh man reading your story really makes my blood boil. I used to see crap like this all the time. Guys ordering more wire than needed. But the full unsed coils really takes a lot of balls. I would have paid a PI to catch them in the act.
 
That's interesting, sorry to hear about it.

Would you mind posting, or PM'ing me your new company policy regarding scrap? I've thought of spelling it out myself, but have not gotten to that point.
 
In a nut shell you cant prosecute scrap theft without a written policy in place, you cant even fire them with cause without that written policy in place.
 
I'm glad you are getting your ducks in a row. I really hate to see theft on any job. I'm a firm believer that if I didn't pay for it, its not mine. Zero tolerance. Its not that hard of a concept. I also think you are labeled by those you hang out with. It's a choice. Good luck.
 
ITO said:
At this point I don't want to know any more than I already do.
Click to expand...

ignorance is bliss...and i agree...sometimes the larger you are, the more you have to close your eyes just to keep from going crazy...
 
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