The Scheme: How GOH Turned Workers’ Wages Into Executive Perks

GOH won public contracts that legally required them to pay their workers a full prevailing wage, including both hourly pay and fringe benefits like retirement contributions and health coverage. Instead of doing that, they built a mechanism to redirect that money upward.

• The Pennsylvania Prevailing Wage Act applies to any public-works contract over $25,000. The federal Davis-Bacon Act applies to any project with more than $2,000 in federal funding. GOH operated under both laws on many of its jobs, meaning their obligation to pay the full prevailing wage was not optional.
• The prevailing wage has two components: an hourly base rate of pay, and fringe benefits. Fringe benefits include employer contributions to workers’ pension funds and health-insurance funds. GOH was required by law to pay both components in full to qualifying workers on every covered project.
• Instead of depositing retirement benefit funds into the accounts of the workers who actually earned them, GOH funneled all of that money into a single unallocated pooled account. Just before the end of the first quarter of the following year, GOH spread those pooled funds across the retirement accounts of all GOH employees, including executives and owners who had no legal entitlement to prevailing-wage fringe benefits.
• On the health and welfare side, GOH paid prevailing-wage workers only a fraction of the legally required benefit amount, then redirected the remainder to cover health benefits for non-prevailing-wage employees and executives.
• To hide the health-and-welfare shortfall from regulators, GOH submitted falsified reports to government agencies claiming it was paying well above what the law required. It did this by using an inflated hourly figure built on grossly inflated costs and expenses that did not legally qualify.
• This conduct ran from 2015 through 2018. The total amount stolen from prevailing-wage workers was approximately $20.7 million.

From Theft to Courtroom: The Full Timeline

The scheme ran for years before any accountability arrived, and even after a criminal plea and class actions, GOH’s leadership spent years more fighting to avoid paying the legal bills their own crimes generated.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Cannot Measure

Here is what the court documents will never fully account for.

The workers who built Pennsylvania’s roads and public infrastructure did so under a legal promise. The promise was straightforward: do this work, under these conditions, and the law guarantees you will be paid fairly, including contributions to a retirement fund that would grow over time and protect you when your body could no longer swing a hammer or run a paving machine. That promise was not abstract. It was encoded into contracts, regulated by state and federal agencies, and backed by criminal statutes.

GOH took those workers’ retirement contributions and put them into a pool. Every dollar a prevailing-wage worker earned toward their retirement was dumped in with everyone else’s money, including the money of executives and owners who held no legal claim to it. Then, months later, the pool was divided out, and the people at the top of the company got a share they had not earned. The workers who actually performed the qualifying labor received less than what the law required, and they had no way to know it was happening.

Retirement accounts are not abstract financial instruments to the people whose names are on them. They are the difference between retiring with some dignity and working until your body forces you to stop. They are the reason a construction worker can look at the years spent in cold and heat and noise and physical punishment and tell themselves it was worth it. When GOH pooled those funds and distributed them to executives, the company was not just manipulating a number on a spreadsheet. It was deciding, unilaterally and secretly, that certain workers’ futures mattered less than the comfort of people who already earned more.

On the health and welfare side, the harm was just as direct. GOH paid only a fraction of the legally required health benefit contributions for prevailing-wage workers, and used the rest to cover benefits for non-qualifying employees and executives. Workers who believed they had full benefit coverage may have made medical decisions, delayed care, or avoided treatments based on coverage they believed existed. The documents do not record those individual moments, but they were real.

Then there is the cover-up. GOH did not just steal the money; it actively lied to government agencies about what it was paying. It filed reports using inflated cost figures and nonqualifying expenses to make itself appear compliant. That means workers who might have noticed a discrepancy, or regulators who might have caught the problem earlier, were deliberately misled. The scheme was designed to be invisible. The workers it harmed had no reason to look for it and no easy mechanism to find it.

By the time the Attorney General filed charges in 2021, the money had already been gone for years. The investment returns and interest that workers would have earned on correctly deposited retirement contributions during those years were gone too. The class-action complaints note explicitly that the delayed and incorrect contributions “deprived and continue to deprive” workers “of interest, earnings and investment returns that otherwise would have been received.” In the years that GOH held and redirected those funds, markets moved. Compounding happened, or failed to happen. Those are real losses that cannot be fully undone by a restitution payment years after the fact.

After all of this, GOH’s leadership did not accept what came next. When workers filed class-action lawsuits, the company and its board members went to federal court to try to force their insurance company to cover the defense costs and potential judgments. The Hawbaker family, whose name is on the company, fought in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to shift the financial consequences of their own criminal scheme onto an insurer. The workers whose retirement funds were stolen had to watch the people who stole from them spend further years in courtrooms arguing about who should pay the bills.

None of that shows up as a line item in a restitution agreement.

Legal Receipts: What the Documents Actually Say

The following are direct quotes from the Third Circuit’s opinion in Twin City Fire Insurance Co. v. Glenn O. Hawbaker, Inc., No. 24-1102, decided October 3, 2024. These are not paraphrases. These are the court’s own words describing what GOH did, drawn from the underlying class-action complaints and the plea agreement record.

“[I]nstead of putting all of the prevailing wage workers’ retirement benefit funds into the account[s] of the worker[s] who actually earned [them], GOH stole that money and used it to pay for all GOH’s employees’, executives’, and owners’ retirement benefits.”

• This language comes directly from the King v. GOH class-action complaint, reproduced in the Third Circuit opinion. The court is quoting the complaint’s own characterization of what GOH did. The word “stole” is not editorial opinion; it is the word used in the complaint that survived legal scrutiny.
• The phrase “all GOH’s employees’, executives’, and owners'” makes explicit that the beneficiaries of the redirected funds included the company’s ownership class, people who already had salary and equity in the company, and who received a retirement benefit subsidy financed by workers who had no idea it was happening.

“GOH paid only a fraction of the required amount of health and welfare benefits to its prevailing-wage employees, ‘stealing the rest to pay for the health and welfare benefits of . . . [its] non-prevailing[-]wage employees and executives.'”

• This is the court quoting both class-action complaints simultaneously, noting they were “substantially similar” on this point. The characterization of the health benefit shortfall as “stealing” appears in both complaints, reinforcing that this was not a bookkeeping error or ambiguous practice.
• The phrase “a fraction of the required amount” means GOH was not making minor rounding errors. It was systematically paying less than the law required over a period spanning at least three years.

“GOH hid its underfunding of prevailing-wage employees’ health and welfare benefits ‘by reporting to government agencies that it was paying well in excess of what was required by law, using an hourly health and welfare figure that was based on grossly inflated costs and nonqualifying expenses.'”

• This quote, also drawn from both complaints, describes an active fraud on government agencies, separate from the underlying wage theft. GOH did not just fail to pay; it submitted false reports to make regulators believe it was overperforming.
• The term “grossly inflated costs and nonqualifying expenses” is legally significant. It means GOH constructed a fictitious accounting methodology specifically to manufacture a compliant-looking number for government review. This is not an ambiguous accounting dispute; it is fabricated documentation.

“In 2021, ‘the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General (OAG) filed a criminal complaint against [GOH], charging [GOH] with four counts of theft by failure to make required disposition of funds received in violation of [18 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. § 3927(a)].’ . . . GOH and the OAG entered into a written plea agreement. As part of that agreement, GOH agreed to plead no contest to the four charges and pay about $20.7 million in restitution to the victims.”

• The no-contest plea means GOH did not contest the state’s factual account of what happened. While a no-contest plea is not a formal admission of guilt in a criminal sense, it carries the same legal consequence: conviction on all four counts of theft.
• The figure of $20.7 million is not an estimate or a plaintiff’s demand. It is the agreed restitution amount in a negotiated plea deal, meaning both GOH and the state’s top law enforcement office agreed that this was the amount owed to workers as victims of the theft.

“[T]he scheme of untimely benefits payments was part and parcel of the scheme to underpay employees.”

• This is the District Court’s finding, affirmed by the Third Circuit, rejecting GOH’s argument that some of the class-action claims were legally separate from the wage theft and therefore should be covered by insurance. The court found the entire operation was one integrated scheme, not several independent acts.
• This ruling had a direct consequence for workers: because all claims were found to be “part and parcel” of wage theft, the insurance coverage fight ended with zero coverage, meaning GOH’s exposure in the class actions remained fully uninsured.

Who Was Connected: The Corporate Structure That Made This Possible

The GOH case did not involve a single bad actor. It required a company, its board, its plan administrator, and a willing insurance relationship to produce the years-long outcome documented in the court record.

What GOH Told Regulators vs. What Was Actually Happening

GOH’s scheme required maintaining a false narrative for government agencies. The gap between the official story and the documented reality is not subtle.

Societal Impact: Who Pays When Wage Laws Get Ignored

When employers illegally reduce health and welfare benefit contributions for blue-collar workers, the downstream effects land on people, not spreadsheets.

• GOH’s prevailing-wage workers received only a fraction of the legally required health and welfare benefit contributions for the duration of the scheme. If any of those workers made health care decisions based on benefit coverage they believed they had but in fact did not, those decisions and their consequences cannot be reversed by a restitution payment.
• Construction work carries elevated rates of injury, chronic musculoskeletal damage, and occupational illness. The workers GOH underpaid were in a high-risk category for needing exactly the health coverage the law required GOH to fund. Systematic underfunding of those benefits for workers in physically demanding jobs is a direct public health risk, not a clerical error.
• The fact that GOH’s fabricated government reports concealed the underfunding means regulatory oversight, the mechanism designed to catch and correct these problems, was deliberately bypassed. Workers had no early warning system. The harm accumulated invisibly for at least three years before outside enforcement intervened.

The architecture of GOH’s scheme was not random. It moved money from the bottom of the company’s income structure to the top, widening the gap between workers and owners in a direct, mechanical way.

• Retirement fund contributions are one of the few wealth-building tools accessible to working-class employees who do not own stock or equity in a company. By redirecting prevailing-wage workers’ retirement contributions to a pooled account and distributing those funds to executives and owners, GOH directly transferred wealth-building capacity from workers to the ownership class.
• The scheme ran for three years, meaning it affected multiple cohorts of workers across multiple project cycles. The compounding effect of correctly deposited retirement contributions over that period represents real lost wealth, not just a nominal balance discrepancy. The class-action complaints specifically flag lost “interest, earnings and investment returns.”
• Prevailing wage laws exist specifically to prevent a race to the bottom on public-works contracts, where the lowest bidder wins by underpaying workers rather than by operating more efficiently. GOH’s scheme undermined that system. Any competitor that followed the law and paid the full prevailing wage was at a structural financial disadvantage against GOH for the duration of the scheme.
• The Hawbaker family, whose names appear on the company and in the appellate record as board members, pursued an insurance coverage appeal at the Third Circuit level after the criminal case concluded. The legal costs of that appeal were spent fighting to avoid accountability, rather than on any form of remedy for affected workers. That is a further transfer of resources away from resolution and toward protection of the family’s financial position.
• Pennsylvania’s prevailing wage system is specifically designed to benefit workers on publicly funded projects, meaning taxpayer money was involved in at least some of the contracts GOH held. The public paid for projects expecting workers on those projects to receive lawful wages. The money that was supposed to flow to workers instead enriched GOH’s ownership structure.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now: What You Can Do and Who Needs to Answer

The Third Circuit closed the insurance coverage fight. That does not mean the broader accountability picture is complete, and it does not mean ordinary people are powerless.

Leadership Named in the Record

The following individuals are named in the case record as appellants, meaning they personally contested the insurance coverage rulings in federal court on behalf of the company and board:

• Daniel Hawbaker — Board of Directors, Glenn O. Hawbaker, Inc.
• Patrick Hawbaker — Board of Directors, Glenn O. Hawbaker, Inc.
• D. Michael Hawbaker — Board of Directors, Glenn O. Hawbaker, Inc.

The Plan Administrator of GOH’s retirement plan was also named as a defendant in the Packer class action for failure to make timely and correct retirement contributions. The Plan Administrator’s name is [REDACTED – Not in Source].

Regulatory Watchlist

The following agencies have jurisdiction over the types of violations documented in this case. If you work in construction, public contracting, or benefits administration, these are the bodies that are supposed to be protecting you:

• Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry: The agency responsible for setting and enforcing prevailing wage rates under the Pennsylvania Prevailing Wage Act. This is the state-level regulator that GOH’s falsified reports were designed to deceive.
• U.S. Department of Labor (Wage and Hour Division): Federal enforcement arm for the Davis-Bacon Act. Has authority to investigate and recover back wages on federally funded public-works projects. File a complaint at dol.gov/agencies/whd.
• U.S. Department of Labor (Employee Benefits Security Administration / EBSA): The federal agency that enforces ERISA, which governs employer retirement plans. The Packer class action raised ERISA claims directly. EBSA investigates fiduciary breaches of this kind.
• Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General: Already brought and resolved the criminal case here. Maintains jurisdiction for future criminal enforcement if similar patterns emerge at other Pennsylvania contractors.
• U.S. Department of Justice (Civil Division): Has authority under the False Claims Act when federal contract funds are involved in wage theft schemes. If any GOH projects were federally funded, False Claims Act exposure may exist beyond the criminal plea.

Actions Worth Taking

• If you worked for GOH on a prevailing-wage project between 2015 and 2018: Contact the class-action attorneys from the King and Packer matters or the PA OAG to verify whether you are included in the restitution pool and what your claim status is. Restitution agreements do not automatically find victims.
• If you work in construction anywhere in Pennsylvania: Request a written accounting of your prevailing-wage fringe benefit contributions on any public-works project. Your employer is legally required to maintain those records. If they cannot or will not provide them, that is a red flag.
• Support your local trade union: The unions that enforce prevailing wage standards, including by filing grievances and monitoring payroll compliance, are the most effective early-warning system for wage theft of this kind. Dues spent on union membership fund the infrastructure that catches these schemes before they run for three years undetected.
• Contact your state legislator: Ask what audit mechanisms exist to verify prevailing-wage compliance on public contracts in Pennsylvania. The GOH scheme persisted because self-reported government filings were accepted without independent verification. That is a structural gap in the oversight system.
• Report suspected prevailing-wage violations: In Pennsylvania, file a complaint with the PA Department of Labor and Industry’s Labor Law Compliance office. For federal projects, use the U.S. DOL Wage and Hour Division online complaint portal at dol.gov/agencies/whd/contact/complaints.