New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has announced the creation of an interagency task force to step up action against companies that wrongly classify employees as independent contractors to skirt wage and tax laws. Under an executive order he signed yesterday, state agencies will cooperate more closely in ferreting out cases of misclassification, and if one agency, like the tax department, finds that a company is misclassifying its workers, it is supposed to share that information with other departments, like the State Workers? Compensation Board. State officials pointed to a study by the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations that estimated that 10 percent of workers in many industries in the state were misclassified as independents.
See "State Takes Aim at Evaders of Wage and Tax Laws", Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times, September 9, 2007