7 Houston pallet firm officials face immigration charges

Seven executives and managers at IFCO, a Houston-based pallet company, were charged Friday with conspiring between 2003 and 2006 to harbor illegal immigrants.

In April 2006, immigration agents raided 40 IFCO pallet plants in 26 states and detained 1,182 undocumented workers. Two of the seven officials charged Friday were Spring residents Christopher Tiesman, 40, the senior vice president of finance and accounting; and Kenneth Gines Jr., 51, controller for pallet services.

Tiesman and Gines, along with two other top-level IFCO executives, are charged “in a related conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration by submitting false payroll-related information to those agencies, and to facilitate the misuse of Social Security numbers by IFCO employees,” said a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Albany, N.Y.  From Chron.com