Owner of Stillwater masonry firm pleads guilty to state tax charge

The owner of a Stillwater masonry business has pleaded guilty to one count of tax evasion and has been barred temporarily from operating a residential contracting business in Minnesota.

After a wage theft investigation, Ramsey County Attorney John Choi in 2023 charged Todd Konigson, owner of Stillwater Masonry Restoration, with seven counts of tax fraud and nine counts of evading taxes by failing to file returns.

In a plea agreement approved this week in Ramsey County district court, Konigson admitted to one felony count of failing to file a withholding tax return in 2018.

He agreed to pay $70,178 in restitution to the Minnesota Department of Revenue for the taxes he owes. He will also serve three years of unsupervised probation.

Konigson would be discharged early from probation upon full payment of his restitution. His felony conviction would then be reduced to a misdemeanor.

Konigson is barred while he is on probation from owning any residential building contractor or remodeling businesses in Minnesota, as well as performing masonry work.

Konigson, who according to court records now lives in Florida, referred questions to his attorney, Thomas Beito.

“It tells you an awful lot about the strength of the government’s case when they were happy to get out of this with [an admission] to one count and a dismissal of the other 15,” Beito said.

From 2017 through 2022, Konigson and Stillwater Masonry failed to timely report $2.5 million in income for tax purposes, according to charging documents. During the same time, he also allegedy failed to report at least $495,680 in workers wages for withholding taxes.

The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office began investigating Konigson’s business for wage theft while it was working on a restoration of St. Paul’s historic Masonic Temple.

Konigson and Stillwater Masonry had allegedly failed to pay workers, subcontractors and vendors in six civil suits from 2014 to 2022, prosecutors said in charging documents.

Konigson or Stillwater Masonry Restortation were hit with judgements totaling $306,390 in three of those cases.

But Beito noted that Konigson was never charged for violating state wage theft laws. Prosecutors “blew a lot of smoke about wage theft,” he said.

Choi said at a press conference Tuesday that the tax charges were most “favorable” for a conviction.

“We felt the best avenue to accountability was to pursue the tax violations,” he said.

In 2022, Ramsey County became one of the first Minnesota counties to hire an investigator to specialize in wage theft cases. The Konigson investigation was its first significant case.