Maryland's Fraud Task Force Found 5,595 Workers. Construction Alone Hides Four Times That.

Misclassifying an employee as an independent contractor is one of the cheapest things an employer can do.▸ No payroll tax, no unemployment insurance premium, no workers' comp coverage, no overtime — the cost simply moves, onto the worker who loses the protection and onto the public systems that lose the contribution. Maryland runs a multi-agency task force whose entire job is to find these cases. In 2024, it found thousands. Independent research says thousands more went unfound, in a single industry, in a single year.

Maryland's Joint Enforcement Task Force on Workplace Fraud (JETF) — reestablished by executive order in January 2024 — pools the state's Department of Labor, Comptroller, and other agencies to chase down businesses that misclassify workers or pay them off the books.▸ Its 2024 Annual Report credits the effort with finding 5,595 misclassified workers and $36 million in unreported taxable wages through Unemployment Insurance Division audits that year, plus $3.5 million in tax, interest, and penalties assessed by the Comptroller.

Set next to that enforcement total, one industry alone dwarfs it.▸ A Century Foundation analysis of 2023 data — cited in the state's own task force report — estimates 23,731 construction workers were misclassified or paid off the books in Maryland that year alone, roughly 11% of the state's entire construction workforce. The two figures cover different years and only one industry against the whole economy, so they aren't strictly additive — but the gap between what a dedicated task force finds and what one trade is estimated to hide is the story.

This isn't a Maryland-only phenomenon.▸ The same research group's original national study, using 2021 data, estimated 1.1 million to 2.1 million construction workers were misclassified or paid off the books nationwide — roughly a fifth of the industry's entire workforce, according to the report's lead author in a subsequent Construction Dive interview. Maryland is simply the one state where a government task force and an independent research shop both published a number for the same year, so the comparison can actually be made.

The Century Foundation's Maryland estimate doesn't stop at a worker count.▸ Using a cost methodology built by the Institute for Construction Employment Research Studies, it prices out what misclassification in the construction trade alone costs workers and public systems every year — payroll taxes employers never remit, overtime never paid, insurance premiums never bought.

The two largest lines — $82.3 million in offloaded FICA payroll tax and $79.1 million in lost Social Security and Medicare contributions — measure overlapping but distinct slices of the same payroll base, per the source's own table, so they shouldn't be added together.▸ Even read separately, they show where the burden lands: not mainly on the employer who avoided it, but on the trust funds and insurance pools that everyone else pays into.

Figures span different years (2023–2024) and, in the scope comparison, different scopes (one industry vs. the whole state economy) because that is what the two source organizations independently published — the gap between them is illustrative of scale, not a precise measurement of the same thing.