Contingent Network Services, LLC Failed to make timely payments, most payments are past due, accused company without evidence West Chester, Ohio

In the middle of 2009 my company was approached by Contingent for some cabling jobs for a Maine government educational contract.

From the onset, Contingent agreed to pay our company material costs immediately after completion of work, with labor to be paid afterward per their NET-60 (ie 60 days) method. Less than half of our work orders (out of 34) were paid anything at all, and two checks were more than a week later than our contacts at Contingent told us they would be.

Contingent was made well aware that, as a small company with little capital, we could not keep laborers working on for the sites that had been scheduled without paying them. We (the business owners) bought materials with our personal money and kept on laborers with the material revenue; as this revenue was late or missing, it caused an interruption in our services for one day, which Contingent promptly blamed on us as if the prior conversations had never occurred. I blindly ignored this warning sign and kept taking on work with them.

Surprisingly, this issue isn't what supposedly caused Contingent to stop working with us or sending payments. All of a sudden I began receiving E-mails claiming that we weren't completing work properly, that their 'quality control' team had discovered grievous problems with almost all of our sites, and that they wouldn't work with us anymore.

We had performed work specifically according to Contingent's own SOW (Statement of Work) and, on the two occasions where glaring but easily solved problems occurred at sites, we traveled back to those sites and rectified the problems at our own cost.

Contingent is claiming almost everything we did was wrong and asked us to wait a week for them to determine how much damage we had done, and make the 'necessary adjustments'. It has been nearly 2 months and all contacts from the project coordinators up to the division managers will not answer or return phone calls or E-mails whatsoever, period. No evidence from any of the sites we completed was presented to us in any form by Contingent. I know for a fact that the customer contacts at all 34 sites were content with our quality of work, and they all signed the work orders stating so.

Contingent owes our business money well into the 5-digit range. They are totally unresponsive. In all honesty I spend every day worrying that they've made a run for Venezuela.

From what I'm seeing now on this site, I'm surprised there's not yet a class-action lawsuit filed against them.

Unless you're intensely masochistic and enjoy doing charity work, avoid Contingent at all costs.