Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul is suing a Humboldt Park construction company after accusing it of misclassifying and underpaying a quarter of its workers over the course of three years.

PMJ Enterprises Inc. is alleged to have classified employees as contractors, and in turn, not paying 70 of them “hundreds of thousands of dollars in owed overtime wages” from 2020 to 2023, according to the lawsuit. It also allegedly used checks and money orders from shell companies to pay workers instead as a way to hide what it was doing.

The company is also accused of underreporting the number of employees it had and the wages it was providing them “to avoid paying required unemployment insurance contributions,” the suit says.

“In Illinois, we will not allow employers to skirt the law by misclassifying their employees as independent contractors,” Raoul said in a statement. “My office will continue to fight to ensure workers are protected from misclassification and violations of their right to be paid what they are owed under the law.”

Raoul is seeking all owed wages, 5% interest, penalties — $2,000 per violation — and an equal amount of punitive damages, to be held in a trust for the affected employees.

PMJ Enterprise Inc., as well as owner Jose Espiritu, who is named in the suit, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.