A second company has been ordered to suspend operations at a construction site in the Tarn department of southern France after labor inspectors found evidence of undeclared work, repeating a pattern already uncovered at the same site earlier the same day.
Inspectors from the Tarn Labor Inspectorate arrived at the Residence L’Eclat du Pastel development in Saint-Sulpice-la-Pointe on July 20, 2026, at 10:58 in the morning. The site is a planned development of 55 individual houses scheduled for delivery in the second half of 2027. During the inspection, officers found a worker carrying out interior painting in one of the houses and checked his employment status.
Declaration filed 41 minutes into the check
Records showed that a pre-employment declaration had been submitted to the Urssaf social security collection body at 11:39 the same morning, 41 minutes after the inspection began. The document, however, stated that the worker’s start date was July 1 at 8 in the morning, suggesting he had already been on the job for three weeks with no prior declaration on file.
As a result, the company SASU Le Ka Peinture was handed a two-week administrative closure order for undeclared work, barring it from operating on the site from July 30, 2026.
The same scenario, twice in one day
The case mirrors what inspectors found during the same visit involving a different contractor, SAS Multi Services Occitania. In that earlier incident, the company’s director had declared the worker present on the site 22 minutes after inspectors arrived and nine minutes after a phone call with one of the inspectors. That company received the same sanctions. Pierre Passion, the developer behind the project, said an internal investigation was underway.
The Tarn prefecture said the sanctions were imposed in view of the gravity and the repeated nature of the violations found. It also noted that project owners are required to exercise a duty of vigilance over the subcontractors working on their sites, and warned that any further illegal employment on the site would result in heavier administrative penalties.
The prefecture added that illegal work is unacceptable, must be systematically sanctioned, and constitutes a priority for state services.
