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The $100 million-plus scam behind the collapse of Fort Lauderdale’s Certified Services is a classic South Florida courtroom tale of greed and woe.  Hundreds of investors who bought Certified’s publicly traded stock were wiped out as insiders looted the company, buying luxury cars and diamonds. Insurance companies who did business with Certified got stiffed for tens of millions of dollars in claims. And injured low- and middle-income employees across the country who counted on Certified to provide worker’s compensation insurance learned too late that their coverage was actually a mirage.

Insurance companies who did business with Certified got stiffed for tens of millions of dollars in claims. And injured low- and middle-income employees across the country who counted on Certified to provide worker’s compensation insurance learned too late that their coverage was actually a mirage.

“There are victims everywhere,” U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission attorney Christopher Martin said in an interview.

Certified, headquartered next to Executive Airport, was a professional employer organization (PEO) with 1,900 corporate clients that have approximately 53,000 employees in 32 states. It made money by handling personnel services for small- and medium-sized companies – including payroll and workers’ compensation coverage supposedly to be purchased through licensed insurance providers.

Former Certified President and Chief Executive Officer Danny Pixler, who once owned a million dollar home on Bayview Drive, is now serving a 60-month sentence after pleading guilty last year to a federal conspiracy charge in the scheme. Two others involved with the company also went to prison.

But the man a federal judge now says was the puppet master, W. Anthony Huff, has not been charged with a crime, though he has been pursued under civil law. In fact, according to the judge, Huff is back in the lightly regulated PEO business with a new company – Tampa-based 02HR – “where he continues his less-than-aboveboard ways.”

Huff, a convicted felon and Kentucky resident, was hit with civil fraud charges by the SEC in 2008 as a result of the Certified debacle. Fort Lauderdale U.S. Magistrate Judge Robin Rosenbaum held a week-long bench trial last February.

In a final judgment issued Friday, the judge held Huff liable for federal securities law violations and ordered him to cough up more than $13 million in ill-gotten gains, including interest. He also was fined $600,000, and enjoined from further violations of federal law, and barred from serving as an officer or director of any publicly traded company.

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Dan Christensen

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From the DOJ -

On June 25, 2010, in Louisville, Kentucky, Danny L. Pixler, of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, pleaded guilty to a one-count Information charging him with failing to pay employment taxes to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).  He was immediately sentenced to 60 months in prison.  According to court records and statements made in court, from 2004 through 2005, Pixler was the President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Certified Services Inc., a publicly traded company.  Certified Services Inc. acted as a holding company for a number of other entities, including the Cura Group, Inc., Certified Staffing Services Corp., I, American Staff Resources, Inc., ABP Group Inc. and other subsidiaries.  These companies operated as Professional Employment Organizations (PEOs) which performed employer-related services to other companies, such as payroll services and procuring worker’s compensation coverage for the employees of its clients.  The subsidiaries collected from its clients the costs and fees associated with the payroll of employees.  In this regard, the subsidiaries undertook the responsibility for collecting and paying to the IRS the quarterly payroll taxes.  This included the funds withheld from employees’ checks as well as the employers’ contributions.  Funds which were collected for the benefit of IRS were considered to be held in trust for the IRS.  Pixler controlled day-to-day operations of the subsidiaries of Certified Services which routinely failed to pay over the taxes owed in a timely fashion.  These companies collectively accumulated a debt to the IRS of approximately $31,104,000.

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