They faked it

From the NY Times:

A building inspector visited a scaffolding last summer on East 90th Street in Manhattan, where workers were restoring the exterior of an apartment building. The inspector noticed something amiss in the site’s safety log: The safety manager who had supposedly signed the log that day could not have done so; he had recently died.

That oddity led New York City officials to investigate, and on Wednesday criminal charges were filed against two companies that provide safety managers at construction sites. The companies, Avanti Building Consultants and NYCB Engineering Group, were accused of hiring unqualified people to pose as licensed site safety managers.

The companies hired people through Craigslist — hairdressers, short-order cooks, musicians, day laborers — to pretend to be safety managers, court papers said. In dozens of cases, the employees skipped the inspections and forged the signatures of real site safety managers on logs, the papers said.

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said the companies compromised safety at 43 sites in New York City over two years, mostly older scaffolded buildings where workers were restoring facades. Three managers and four employees were arrested on Wednesday.