Todd
palm harbor,#2
Sat, August 22, 2009
This is a response to the false accusation from Frank and Michelle Balogh of New Port Richey. Our company had contracted with the Balogh's for an exceptionally large and complicated renovation and construction project at their residence. My understanding was that they had just been awarded a large settlement from their homeowners insurance and was improving the entire property, not just the affected areas.
Our firm was selected because of our experience (30 years in business) and our volume of work (over 1000 projects annually). Initially the project went very smooth and was supervised by one of our most experienced field inspectors. As we made progress we noticed that scheduled payments were becoming delinquent and becoming harder to collect. As the president of the company I decided to get involved and visited the jobsite several times and met the homeowners. After a tour of the property and witnessing the elaborate renovations it became clear why the payments stalled. I contacted several of the other contractors who were working on different areas of the property for the homeowners and to my horror, learned that they had not been paid either. So we decided to investigate the property and discovered a tax lien and multiple liens from unpaid contractors.
At this point we were due approximately $15,000 for work that was already performed. So we made a punch list of items but the homeowner refused to sign it. So we took a chance and replaced a huge area of the pavers with the manufacturers assistance. The customer now claimed he wasn't satisfied with the new material either. And the previously removed material was now mysteriously missing from his property and discovered at his lawn business nearby.
The situation became clear that the homeowner's had exceeded his budget, blown the insurance money and had no means to pay for work performed by us or other contractors. His intent was obvious . . . to create unreasonable objections in an effort to default on contractual obligations.
He claims work remains unfinished. In this day and age there are many quality contractors aggressively looking for any work and would certainly "wrap up" a job from another contractor . . . if they were actually going to get paid. It is clear that the homeowner is out of money and has misappropriated funds from his insurance settlement.
Initially we were going to pursue Mr. Balogh, but soon realized that he was unrecoverable. We came to the conclusion that further action would cause our company to suffer additional losses as a result of this serial scam artist and factored our loss into " the cost doing business" category.