By Sheila Loftus

After a plea agreement, a 35-year employee of Allstate must pay back taxes and a $10,000 fine.

The employee, Robert Groebner, has admitted he asked Allstate PRO shops for payments in exchange for being on Allstate’s PRO program. At the time he was fired from Allstate in September 2002, he oversaw the operations of 27 PRO shops in the Chicago area. An FBI investigation followed.

This author, when she was the editor and publisher of Hammer and Dolly magazine and the executive director of the Washington Metropolitan Auto Body Association, received phone calls from Chicago-area collision repairers as early as March 1997 complaining about Groebner’s tactics. This author reported Groebner’s actions to Allstate’s Special Investigation Unit on January 6, 1998.

In addition to his fine, Groebner received a one-year probation, including 10 months of home confinement with an electronic monitoring mechanism. Also, he must pay $72,000 in restitution to three Chicagoland collision repair shop owners who tipped off the FBI about Groebner soliciting bribes.

Groebner, who suffers from type two diabetes and side effects from a stoke he had after the investigation began, could have faced jail time of up to three years. He also suffers from a heart condition and Fuch’s Dystrophy, a degenerative eye disease that will eventually take his eyesight. Thus, in his sentencing pleadings, he asked not to be jailed with the implication that his medication and therapy requirements would burden the state.

During his sentencing in Federal Court in Chicago on December 6, Groebner was scared and teary-eyed. In his statement to the court, he said he had shamed his family and his family name. Groebner’s son, Bob Jr., is an assistant states attorney in Cook County, and his daughter, Mariette, is an administrative law judge for the Illinois Human Rights Commission.

Groebner’s plea agreement stated the situation bluntly: “Defendant will plead guilty because he is in fact guilty…”

As a damage evaluator at Allstate, Groebner was in charge of 21 collision repair shops in and around Chicago. But “no later than 1999” and continuing through the middle of 2002, Groebner used his position to solicit payments from the owners of three PRO shops, the plea agreement said.

The owner of a shop in Palatine, Ill., began making monthly payments of between $500 and $2000 to Groebner around October of 1999 because he was worried Groebner would cancel the shop’s PRO agreement. In total, Groebner received about $72,000 from the shop, the plea agreement revealed.

The FBI wired the shop owner with a recording device, and the device caught an exchange between the two men in which Groebner told the shop owner to “forget about” one month’s payment. Simultaneously, he was pocketing $2000 in cash from the shop owner.

A second shop owner, whose facility was located in Chicago and was on Allstate’s PRO program, believed he was required to make $1000 monthly payments in order to remain on the program. Groebner bilked this shop owner out of roughly $12,000 from 1999 to 2001, the plea agreement said.

A third owner, whose shop was also in Chicago and was also part of Allstate’s PRO program, made monthly payments of between $500 and $2000 to Groebner. Between 1999 and 2001, Groebner received as much as $12,000 from the shop owner, according to the plea agreement.

Groebner’s taxes didn’t reflect his additional “income.” His April 12, 2002, taxes, for example, under-reported the money he’d brought in by as much as $48,000, the plea agreement said.

While the plea agreement states that Groebner received approximately $60,000 in cash from the three collision repair shops, observers of Groebner’s activities over the years estimate that Groebner pocketed well over a $500,000 from his work with Allstate PRO shops.

© 2007 Sheila’s Information Network Inc.

Sheila Loftus (sheilaloftus@yahoo.com), publisher of the CRASH Network, has written about the auto collision repair industry for 32 years. She lives in Washington, D.C.