Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Lancaster Contractor Sentenced for Violating Probation

LOS ANGELES — A once-prominent Lancaster electrical contractor, jailed in 1991 on a payroll fraud conviction, was sentenced Tuesday to nine more months in County Jail and ordered to repay several hundred ex-employees for shortchanging their pension fund by more than $640,000.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Charles Horan imposed the sentence on James H. Paxin, 40, owner of the now-defunct Paxin Electric Inc. The former Palmdale resident admitted that the missing pension payments violated the terms of his 1991 probation in the payroll fraud case.

Prosecutors said about 270 former Paxin employees now must decide whether they want to hire an attorney to pursue repayment of the pension funds. Because Paxin contends that he has no remaining assets, the judge ordered him to grant non-dischargeable civil obligations to his former employees.

“They’ve got to go ahead and file their judgments and hope,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Stephen Cooley, a prosecutor in the case. Asked what chance the former employees have of getting the money that Paxin owes them, Cooley said, “I don’t know if there’s any blood left in that turnip.”

Paxin’s firm once handled much of the electrical work for government public works projects in the Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys. But he now faces scores of civil lawsuits over the demise of his business and a federal Department of Labor investigation into the pension funding.

Originally, Paxin was sentenced in February, 1991, to six months in County Jail after pleading no contest to 10 misdemeanor counts of failing to keep accurate payroll records in 1988 and 1989. Prosecutors contended that he underpaid his workers by about $170,000 on two government public works projects.

Paxin Electric, amid a worsening economy, then went under in December, 1991. But prosecutors later learned Paxin also had claimed, but never paid, $641,451 in company contributions to his employees’ pension fund between 1989 and 1991. That amount was the subject of the judge’s repayment order.