TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — The Chief Financial Officer of All Florida Safety Institute says the company is in trouble, in part, because instructors stopped showing up for customers’ lessons. Some of those employees say they had a very good reason: the company stopped paying.
“We keep leaving because we’re not getting paid,” said Leslie Amoros, who quit her job as an instructor out of the Pinellas Park office.
She claims paychecks were sporadic and she is owed $3,500. She says employees stayed as long as they could.
“We truly enjoy what we do,” she said. “Nobody wanted to leave their students like that, but working for free. We had the cars to take home. We had the gas to get and from, but the majority of us were losing our homes, our electricity. We have families.”
Paul Trippy, the CFO, told Investigator Shannon Behnken that the company would pay all employees, as it works through this reorganization.
But when Amoros reached out to Trippy herself, he responded by email with an email that said, in part: “As for payment distribution, only working instructors will be paid going forwards according to the courts as their goal for us is to get into a healthy position so we can exit the sub chap 5 and go back to normal operation with a reduced debt load.”
This leaves other former instructors, like Robert Miller who’s owed $4,000, fuming. Some former employees say they are owed as much as $10,000 in back pay. This is Miller’s message for the company:
“It’s not right. It’s fraud. It’s fraud .. what you’re doing is fraud,” Miller said. “You’re taking money from customers and not provide the service.”
