Corporate Negligence Case Study: Industrial TurnAround Corporation & Its Impact on American Workers

TLDR: In August 2022, a massive bin of phosphate rock collapsed, severely injuring three miners. The company responsible for ensuring the bin’s structural safety, Industrial TurnAround Corporation (ITAC), was later cited by federal safety inspectors for allegedly failing to take defective equipment out of service. When the government mailed a penalty notice, the company simply ignored it, later claiming it had failed to update its mailing address for 14 years. This report peels back the layers of legal maneuvering to reveal a story of corporate negligence and a regulatory system struggling to hold anyone accountable.

Read on to understand how this single case exposes the deep-seated failures of corporate responsibility in modern America.

1. Introduction: The Human Cost of Corporate Negligence

Three miners’ lives were irrevocably changed on August 22, 2022. On that day, a bin filled with phosphate rock collapsed, inflicting severe injuries upon them. This catastrophic failure was the direct result of alleged safety lapses by a corporation tasked with preventing exactly this kind of disaster.

Industrial TurnAround Corporation (ITAC) was the independent contractor responsible for inspecting the structural integrity of the bin’s support columns at the Lee Creek Mine in North Carolina. The government alleges the company failed in its most basic duty: to identify and remove defective equipment from service. This case is a depressing illustration of how corporate priorities can endanger workers and how legal systems, supposedly designed for justice, can be manipulated to delay it.

2. Inside the Allegations: A Pattern of Serious Lapses

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) investigated the collapse and issued a citation to ITAC. The government’s charge was direct: the company violated federal safety regulations by failing to take dangerously defective equipment out of service. This was not a minor infraction but a fundamental breach of the safety protocols that are the last line of defense for miners working in hazardous conditions.

Following the citation, the MSHA calculated a proposed penalty of $33,983 and sent the notice to ITAC. The company, however, never responded.

Thirty days later, the penalty automatically became a final, uncontestable order. It was only then that ITAC claimed its failure to respond was due to “excusable neglect,” stating it had not occupied the address on file with the government since 2009—a full 14 years. One of the company’s own employees had to physically visit the old address to check for missing packages, where they finally discovered the penalty notice weeks after the deadline had passed.

This excuse was questioned even within the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission. A dissenting commissioner pointed out that ITAC’s explanation—failing to maintain a correct address of record—is itself an independent violation of the Mine Act. The company’s defense against one violation was an admission of another.

Timeline of Corporate Failure

Date	Event	Consequence
Since 2009	Industrial TurnAround Corporation (ITAC) fails to update its official address of record with federal regulators.	This administrative failure becomes the cornerstone of the company’s later attempt to evade a penalty.
August 22, 2022	A bin of phosphate rock collapses at the Lee Creek Mine.	Three miners are severely injured.
September 27, 2022	The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) issues a citation to ITAC.	The citation alleges ITAC was responsible for the structural safety of the bin and failed to remove defective equipment from service.
March 30, 2023	MSHA mails a proposed penalty of $33,983 to ITAC’s 14-year-old address.	The legal process to hold the company financially accountable begins.
April 3, 2023	The penalty notice is delivered and accepted by an unknown person.	The 30-day clock for ITAC to contest the penalty starts ticking.
May 25, 2023	An ITAC employee visits the old address and discovers the MSHA notice.	The company becomes aware of the penalty nearly two months after it was sent and weeks after it became final.
June 5, 2023	ITAC files a motion to reopen the penalty.	The company argues its failure to respond was “excusable neglect,” initiating a legal battle over procedure rather than the merits of the safety violation.
February 16, 2024	The Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission grants ITAC’s motion.	The decision resets the accountability process, forcing the Department of Labor to appeal and further delaying justice for the injured miners.

3. Regulatory Capture & Loopholes: A System Designed for Delay

This case exposes the fractures in America’s regulatory framework, where corporate entities can exploit procedural loopholes to escape the consequences of their actions. The Mine Safety and Health Act is clear: a penalty becomes final and “not subject to review by any court or agency” if it is not contested within 30 days. Yet, the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission asserted its jurisdiction to reopen just such a final order.

By granting ITAC’s motion, the Commission allowed a company that admitted to a 14-year administrative failure to sidestep a final penalty.

This action effectively rewards corporate inattention. The system, intended to ensure swift and certain penalties to deter future safety violations, becomes a forum for endless procedural debates, while the underlying issue of worker safety is pushed to the background. The Secretary of Labor argued that allowing the Commission to “reopen final orders at its whim” undermines the entire enforcement mechanism of the Act.

4. Profit-Maximization at All Costs: The Price of Cutting Corners

Under the logic of neoliberal capitalism, every dollar not spent on non-revenue-generating activities is a dollar saved. Maintaining an accurate address with a federal agency does not directly produce profit. For 14 years, ITAC apparently neglected this basic administrative duty, a clear symptom of a corporate culture that prioritizes operations over compliance.

This was not a simple clerical error. It was a sustained, decade-plus failure to perform a legally required function. Such neglect is often a canary in the coal mine, signaling a deeper disregard for rules that do not contribute to the bottom line. The very service ITAC provides—checking structural integrity—is about meticulous attention to detail. The company’s failure to apply that same standard to its own legal obligations speaks volumes about its priorities.

5. The Economic Fallout: Shifting the Burden

The immediate economic fallout landed on the three severely injured miners, who faced physical recovery and potential loss of livelihood.

But the costs ripple outward. When a company leverages legal procedures to delay or avoid penalties, the financial burden of enforcement falls upon the American public. The Department of Labor, funded by taxpayers, must expend resources fighting a procedural battle that only exists because of the company’s admitted negligence.

Furthermore, when penalties lose their deterrent effect, the cost of future accidents—in medical care, lost productivity, and human suffering—is borne by workers and society at large. The $33,983 fine was meant to be a swift punishment. Instead, it has become the subject of a prolonged and costly legal fight, demonstrating that for some corporations, litigation is just another cost of doing business.

6. Public Health & Safety Risks: A Predictable Disaster

The collapse of the phosphate bin was a preventable disaster. Federal regulations requiring the removal of defective equipment exist for one reason: to protect human lives. MSHA’s citation suggests that ITAC failed to adhere to this critical safety standard. The company was hired as a safety expert, yet its alleged failure created the very hazard it was paid to prevent.

This incident highlights a core flaw in a system reliant on third-party contractors for safety. When the drive to secure and complete contracts cheaply overrides the non-negotiable demands of safety, workers are the ones who pay the price. The severe injuries sustained by the three miners are a direct consequence of this prioritization of business interests over public and worker health.

7. Exploitation of Workers: The True Victims

At the heart of this legal saga are the three miners who were crushed by a collapsing structure. Their injuries are the central, tragic outcome of the alleged corporate failures. While executives and lawyers argue over procedural technicalities in Washington D.C., these workers and their families are left to deal with the life-altering consequences.

The system’s focus on the corporation’s “excusable neglect” in updating an address serves to obscure the real-world harm. This is a common pattern in late-stage capitalism, where corporate entities are treated with a degree of grace and understanding—the ability to have their mistakes excused—that is rarely extended to the working people they endanger.

8. Community Impact: The Unseen Consequences in Beaufort, North Carolina

The Lee Creek Mine is a significant economic entity in Beaufort, North Carolina. Industrial accidents do more than harm the individuals directly involved, they also send shockwaves through tight-knit communities. An incident of this severity can impact morale among the workforce and raise anxieties among families who rely on the mine for their livelihood.

When the accountability process is stalled or undermined, it erodes trust between workers, employers, and the regulators meant to protect them. The community is left to wonder if the safety of their loved ones is truly a priority for the corporations operating in their backyard. The legal maneuvering in a distant courtroom has tangible effects on the ground, fostering cynicism and a sense of powerlessness.

9. The PR Machine: From “Excusable Neglect” to Legal Strategy

ITAC’s legal defense is a masterclass in corporate spin. The company framed its 14-year failure as “excusable neglect, mistake or inadvertence.” It explicitly denied that its actions were the result of “indifference, inattention, inadequate or unreliable office procedures or general carelessness,” even though a 14-year lapse is the very definition of inattention and inadequate procedures.

This is the language of strategic deflection. By casting itself as a victim of a simple mistake, the company attempts to shift focus away from the more damning allegation: that its failure to ensure a bin’s structural integrity led to severe injuries. It is a calculated attempt to trade a minor admission of administrative sloppiness for absolution from a major safety violation.

10. Wealth Disparity & Corporate Greed: A $33,000 Penalty for Life-Altering Injuries

The proposed penalty of $33,983 is, on its face, a trivial amount for a corporation involved in major industrial projects. In the context of neoliberal capitalism, such fines are often viewed as a minor operational expense, not a meaningful deterrent. For a company to fight so hard to avoid this relatively small sum speaks to a corporate ethos where every dollar of liability must be resisted, regardless of the underlying facts.

This stands in steep contrast to the immense and unquantifiable cost borne by the injured workers. Their lives are permanently altered, while the corporation fights to protect its profit margin. This case exemplifies the profound wealth and power disparity that defines modern capitalism, where human health is assigned a low price tag and corporate liability is minimized at all costs.

11. Corporate Accountability Fails the Public: Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

The Secretary of Labor’s petition to the U.S. Court of Appeals argues for a simple principle: final orders should remain final. The government’s position is that allowing the Commission to reopen this case creates a damaging precedent, weakening the power of MSHA to enforce safety laws. When penalties can be relitigated based on a company’s own long-standing negligence, the entire concept of accountability crumbles.

The court ultimately dismissed the Secretary’s petition on jurisdictional grounds, stating the order to reopen was not a “final agency action” and therefore not yet appealable. While legally sound, this outcome means more delays. The case is now remanded for further proceedings, and justice for the three injured miners is pushed even further into the future.

12. This Is the System Working as Intended: Profit Over People

This case should not be seen as a failure of the system, but as an example of the system working exactly as it was designed to under late-stage capitalism. The legal and regulatory structures provide numerous off-ramps and procedural hurdles that benefit corporations. These features allow companies to transmute substantive failures—like endangering workers—into procedural debates about mailing addresses and filing deadlines.

The prioritization of corporate continuity over swift accountability is a hallmark of a neoliberal framework. The system is built to absorb and neutralize shocks, treating worker injuries as a cost to be managed and litigated, rather than a moral crisis to be urgently addressed. ITAC’s ability to bog the process down for years is not a bug; it is a feature of our fucked up economic system.

13. Legal Minimalism: Doing Just Enough to Stay Plausibly Legal

The behavior of Industrial TurnAround Corporation is a textbook example of legal minimalism, a common strategy in neoliberal capitalism where companies do the absolute minimum required to comply with the form, but not the spirit, of the law. The Mine Act requires every operator to maintain a current address with safety regulators, a rule designed to ensure vital communications are received. ITAC’s failure to do so for 14 years demonstrates a deep disregard for the intent behind this basic compliance task.

When caught, the company deployed the language of legal minimalism to frame its gross negligence as a minor oversight. It invoked Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b), claiming its failure to contest the penalty was the result of “mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect”.

This maneuver treats the law not as a set of moral or ethical obligations to protect workers, but as a game where finding the right procedural argument can erase substantive failure. It is a compliance culture that prioritizes plausible deniability over proactive responsibility.

14. How Capitalism Exploits Delay: The Strategic Use of Time

In late-stage capitalism, time is a weapon that corporations can wield against workers, regulators, and the public. The ITAC case is a chronicle of strategic delay, where justice delayed is profit preserved. The timeline of this case shows a system where accountability moves at a glacial pace, allowing corporate actors to benefit from the lag.

From the initial incident in August 2022 to the court’s dismissal of the government’s appeal in June 2025, years have passed with no resolution.

The case has been remanded back to an administrative law judge for “further proceedings,” adding another layer of time-consuming litigation. For the government, this is “the avoidance of litigation for its own sake”. For the corporation, every day the $33,983 penalty is not paid is a small victory, and the mounting legal costs for the taxpayer-funded Department of Labor serve as a disincentive for future robust enforcement. This is how the system monetizes delay, making it cheaper to fight regulation than to comply with it.

15. The Language of Legitimacy: How Courts Frame Harm

The legal system uses a specialized, dispassionate language that can neutralize the moral weight of corporate harm. The severe injuries of three miners are filtered through abstract legal doctrines, transforming a human tragedy into a dry academic question. The entire appeal hinged on whether the Commission’s order to reopen the case was an “important issue” that qualified as a “particular value of a high order” deserving of immediate review.

The court concluded it was not. It determined that the Secretary of Labor’s interest in preventing “litigation for its own sake” or in ensuring the Commission engaged in “reasoned decisionmaking” was not a sufficiently strong justification to overcome the general rule against piecemeal appeals.

The phrase “excusable neglect” itself is a masterpiece of legal minimization, casting a 14-year dereliction of duty as a simple, forgivable slip-up. This technocratic language creates a buffer between the court’s decision and the real-world consequences, legitimizing a process that feels deeply unjust to the average person.

16. Monetizing Harm: When Victimization Becomes a Revenue Model

While ITAC did not directly bill its victims, its actions align with a broader capitalist model where minimizing the financial consequences of harming others is a de facto revenue-protection strategy.

The $33,983 penalty was a calculated cost assessed by the government for alleged safety failures. By fighting this penalty through years of litigation, the company treats the fine not as a punishment for wrongdoing but as a negotiable expense to be deferred, reduced, or eliminated entirely.

This strategy effectively monetizes harm. The company retains capital that should have been paid as a penalty, while the true costs—medical bills, lost wages, and human suffering—are borne by the injured workers. In a system where fines are seen as a cost of doing business, there is a powerful incentive to invest in legal delays rather than in upfront safety measures. This turns the process of accountability into a financial calculation, stripping it of its moral purpose.

17. Profiting from Complexity: When Obscurity Shields Misconduct

Corporate power often thrives in complexity, using opaque structures and intricate rules to shield itself from accountability. In the ITAC case, the complexity is not in a web of shell companies but in the thicket of administrative and procedural law. The company’s defense hinges on arcane legal concepts like Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b) and the “collateral order doctrine”.

This procedural complexity shifts the entire focus of the dispute. The conversation is no longer about a collapsed bin, injured workers, or defective equipment. Instead, highly-paid lawyers and judges debate the three-prong test of the

Cohen doctrine and whether an order “conclusively determines the disputed question”. This tactic is incredibly effective: it obscures the simple, damning facts of the case behind a wall of legal jargon that is inaccessible to the public, ensuring the battle is fought on territory where corporations have the advantage

18. Conclusion: A Call for Real Accountability

The story of the three injured miners and Industrial TurnAround Corporation is a microcosm of a much larger national issue. It reveals a corporate culture where basic duties are neglected and a legal system where accountability is secondary to procedure. The alleged failure to make a workplace safe was compounded by a 14-year failure to maintain a correct address, which was then used as a tool to evade responsibility.

This is both a legal and a moral. True corporate accountability requires more than paltry fines issued after a disaster. It requires a regulatory system with teeth, one that cannot be gamed by procedural tricks, and a cultural shift where the health and safety of workers are treated as a sacred trust, not an item on a balance sheet.

19. Frivolous or Serious Lawsuit?: Assessing the Core Grievance

The legal action in this case is far from frivolous. It represents a fundamental grievance at the heart of labor protection. The Secretary of Labor is defending the integrity of the Mine Safety and Health Act. The government’s lawsuit seeks to establish that a company cannot use its own admitted, multi-year negligence as a shield against accountability for endangering workers.

At its core, this is a fight to ensure that safety regulations have meaning and that penalties for violating them are swift and certain. The severe injuries to three human beings underscore the profound seriousness of the original citation. The subsequent legal battle is a necessary, if frustrating, effort to uphold a principle that is essential for the protection of every worker in every hazardous industry in the country.

You can visit this link to learn more about this: https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-caDC-24-01058/context

ITAC has a LinkedIn page where their URL describes them as a “family” lolol: https://www.linkedin.com/company/itacfamily

💡 Explore Corporate Misconduct by Category

Corporations harm people every day — from wage theft to pollution. Learn more by exploring key areas of injustice.

• 💀 Product Safety Violations — When companies risk lives for profit.
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• 💵 Financial Fraud & Corruption — Lies, scams, and executive impunity.

NOTE:

This website is facing massive amounts of headwind trying to procure the lawsuits relating to corporate misconduct. We are being pimp-slapped by a quadruple whammy:

1. The Trump regime's reversal of the laws & regulations meant to protect us is making it so victims are no longer filing lawsuits for shit which was previously illegal.
2. Donald Trump's defunding of regulatory agencies led to the frequency of enforcement actions severely decreasing. What's more, the quality of the enforcement actions has also plummeted.
3. The GOP's insistence on cutting the healthcare funding for millions of Americans in order to give their billionaire donors additional tax cuts has recently shut the government down. This government shut down has also impacted the aforementioned defunded agencies capabilities to crack down on evil-doers. Donald Trump has since threatened to make these agency shutdowns permanent on account of them being "democrat agencies".
4. My access to the LexisNexis legal research platform got revoked. This isn't related to Trump or anything, but it still hurt as I'm being forced to scrounge around public sources to find legal documents now. Sadge.

All four of these factors are severely limiting my ability to access stories of corporate misconduct.

Due to this, I have temporarily decreased the amount of articles published everyday from 5 down to 3, and I will also be publishing articles from previous years as I was fortunate enough to download a butt load of EPA documents back in 2022 and 2023 to make YouTube videos with.... This also means that you'll be seeing many more environmental violation stories going forward :3

Thank you for your attention to this matter,

Aleeia (owner and publisher of www.evilcorporations.com)

Also, can we talk about how ICE has a $170 billion annual budget, while the EPA-- which protects the air we breathe and water we drink-- barely clocks $4 billion? Just something to think about....