Thursday, October 1, 2026
Throughout the country, an easily overlooked category of crime has become a multi-billion-dollar industry: Insurance fraud costs consumers $806 billion every year, taking financial bites out of construction, transportation, real estate and other industries. Long Island’s local business leaders are sharing their strategies to avoid contributing to that statistic.
Some 160 business owners and employees welcomed advice from elected officials, security firms and fellow business people at a panel at the Morrelly Homeland Security Center in Bethpage on May 13.
This was the first panel connecting government agencies and local businesses to share information about fighting insurance fraud, according to John Capece, Nassau County’s consumer affairs commissioner.
“This is the first time in Long Island history that we have a meeting with all the building departments and the Department of Consumer Affairs to host a seminar for training and for communication,” Capece said.
The panel, sponsored by the Long Island Builders Institute, is intended to be the first of many. Capece conceived of the idea to kick off a larger effort to improve consumer safety by helping community members and local businesses identify and avoid malicious actors.
“We want to stop them because they prey on the elderly and the vulnerable people that don’t understand contracts … they get sucked into something where they think they’re going to save so much money and they don’t,” Capece said. “We want to educate the public.”
Panelists discussed the optimal ways of handling everything from home improvement contractor licensing, permitting, solar installations and contracting oversight to responding to fraudulent insurance and training certificates and staged construction accidents, as well as other topics impacting homeowners and the building industry.
Panelist Gina Farese is a solar energy entrepreneur and a member of Nassau County’s Home Improvement Advisory Committee and many other groups in the industry. She has seen many cases of improper business dealings, ranging from roofing coverage to workers who aren’t on a contractor’s official payroll.
“There’s a lot of things that are broken and so far gone, and I’m seeing so many homeowners get, unfortunately, taken,” Farese said. “So many people just care about their bottom line … at the end of the day, it’s just making sure that the homeowners are protected properly, and educating people.”
Mary Harkins serves as counsel to the county’s Department of Consumer Affairs. She advises Capece and the department on the interpretation of local laws, with a focus on contract violations.
“Now we’re able to address it more proactively, rather than just reacting,” Harkins said. “Our licensing division is about, like, six people, some part-time, and we’re dealing with 10,000 licenses plus about 800 new applications per year. It’s a lot of responsibility, but in reality, we’re moving on it.
“We’re trying to uncover the really great contractors out there,” Harkins added. For bad actors in the industry, the department, she said, is “trying to identify them and take corrective action.”
The number one way to protect yourself against risk, Capece said, is to verify that any contractor in your home is legitimately licensed.
For more information, call Nassau County Consumer Affairs at (516) 571-2465.
