Thread: FL:Tax Collector worker charged with falsifying friends’ i

Tax Collector worker charged with falsifying friends’ immigration status

By RYAN MILLS

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2007/nov ... after_inv/?



Citizenship is just one click away at the Collier County Tax Collector’s driver’s license office.

Of course, driver’s license examiners are required to collect documentation verifying that a client is, in fact, a United States citizen and to scan the documentation into a state computer system before changing the client’s citizenship status on their license.

Employees also are required to read and sign a form stating that they understand that fraudulently processing a driver’s license or ID card is punishable by dismissal and possible criminal prosecution.

That form wasn’t enough to stop 31-year-old Cesar Augusto Romero, 175 Palm Drive, Unit I, East Naples, from fraudulently issuing driver’s licenses to two friends, both illegal immigrants, stating that they were U.S. citizens, the Collier County Sheriff’s Office said Tuesday.

Romero, a veteran of the U.S. Army who worked at the driver’s license office at 725 Airport-Pulling Road for nearly three years, was arrested Tuesday on two counts of document fraud by a DMV employee. The charge is a third-degree felony.

The arrest stems from two driver’s licenses Romero issued over the summer to his friend, Santiago Cajiao Gutierrez, and Gutierrez’s wife, Sandra P. Delgadillo Fonseca, who were both in the country illegally from Colombia, the Sheriff’s Office reported.

Gutierrez entered the country in 1999 on a visitor visa, never left and was classified as an “overstay violator,â€

[quote]“There’s nothing that does that,â€