The Manhattan District Attorney's office announced an enforcement action Tuesday centered on fake safety training cards, saying the scheme put roughly 20,000 construction workers at risk, according to the Manhattan DA's press release.

The cards in question stand in for Site Safety Training (SST) credentials — the Local Law 196 cards every worker on a covered NYC site has to carry, proving they sat through OSHA-aligned safety training before they're allowed on a job. If a card is fake, the worker behind it never got that training, no matter what the laminate in his pocket says.

The DA's release does not name specific defendants, firms, or job sites in the portion provided here, and this piece states only what the office's own announcement says: that the office identified a scheme producing fraudulent cards and that its scope touches a very large number of workers across the city's construction workforce. Any individual or company named in the DA's fuller filing would be facing accusations, not proven conduct, unless and until a court finds otherwise.

Site Safety Training cards get checked at the gate on covered sites — new construction and major demolition jobs above certain thresholds under Local Law 196 — and a GC or construction superintendent who lets an unverified card through is exposed to DOB enforcement on their own site, separate from whatever the DA pursues against the cardmakers. Fake cards in circulation mean the paperwork at the shanty is no longer a reliable stand-in for actual training, and 20,000 is not a rounding error against the city's SST-card population.

For a contractor or safety manager, the move to make today is a spot audit: pull SST card numbers already on file for your crews and cross-check them against DOB's public SST card lookup rather than trusting the physical card alone. The Manhattan DA's office has not, per its release, published a public list of the specific card numbers or vendors under investigation as of this writing; contractors with questions about their own workforce's cards should watch for a follow-up release or contact DOB directly, not rely on secondhand summaries.

This is a DA enforcement announcement, not a DOB incident record, and no NYC Department of Buildings dataset entry accompanies it as of this writing.