I'm not a law & order guy, I just know a lot of civil servants and I work in the defense contracting industry. Given the choice between "vast conspiracy" and "incompetence", anything involving civil servants is going to be incompetence.

They did something to pop up on a radar screen, or pissed off some "volunteers". All businesses are required to have worker's compensation in California, my suspicion is that there was never a Worker's Comp policy in force for the business, and that has teeth, but is more work to go after, so they picked an easy one. Contra Costa county is filled with the leftist liberals of the Bay Area, I'm pretty sure it was one of the volunteers...

They could have gotten around that quite easily by just being a non-profit, but generally that requires some programs for the public, charitable works, etc.. I really think it was a for-profit disguising in some way or doing something that threw up some flags.

I see it like this... you can choose to live in the Wild West of Nevada, with no social services, people working 3 8-hour shifts in a row for 3 different casinos for 24 hour work days 7 days a week for $8 an hour, or you can pay some more taxes and live somewhere that the rules may be a little more oppressive.

The business owner chose to live in California, and skirt the rules. Let's be honest, they had a winery in the San Francisco Bay Area where a 1 bedroom condo is going to be $500,000+. This isn't a few thousand square feet of play-dirt in Montana. It doesn't have much to do with an Atlas Shrugged type of thing, its about whether or not you have a legitimate business, or if its a paper-business so you can depreciate the property you live on to offset your normal income taxes (my suspicion). If its not a legitimate business, its income tax fraud and a bunch of other stuff. If you are going to take that approach, it has to be a legitimate business and do the Worker's Comp, the tax stamps in the form of a business license, and either do all the work yourself like a real entrepreneur or actually pay the workers. Another aspect in California is that interns, if not paid, can't do anything of material value to the business. If you have them out cold-calling door to door, you need to compensate them in some way. You can't have an unpaid intern digging a septic tank hole that you are going to charge $10,000 for. Why? Because why should someone be making material gain on labor and that 'labor' goes and gets welfare & Medi-Cal benefits. The assumption is that they are probably being paid... probably in cash/under the table. That would be hard to prove, so you take the easy approach. They had unpaid interns in a for-profit business, either fess-up to that, or prove you paid them (under the table) and go with a lot of tax-evasion charges.

I'm sure the owner just filed a bankruptcy on the business, and will just re-open it with a new entity so they can depreciate their personal real estate more again, but will probably pay someone 8 hours a week or whatever for what legitimate work is needed, or do it themselves, or if the labor cost is higher than the tax write-off, just forget it.

I'm sure the Lets Shrug types jump on the tax element, but taxes in California, despite having the higher end of income taxes, are otherwise pretty reasonable for real estate - its limited to 1% of the original purchase price of the property (annually) and it declines if the market value declines, but cannot ever go "up" in appreciation above the original purchase price. I don't think any other states have that protection, and most are going to be closer to 3% of the value per year... California has a large government, but we're also the 8th largest economy in the world and a little under 20% of the US population by ourselves.

My last point, is that agriculture is serious business in California... its a $50 billion industry, and only behind high tech and probably entertainment/music/films in California for size. We grow the lion's share of produce for the United States, and virtually all of the fresh produce & vegetables and nuts. If you fly over California, you notice that not an inch of land is wasted, fly over Colorado and you struggle to find some land that is actually used. We're the largest wine producer in the world, and with that comes an oversight of (that) business that is probably pretty profound. You're also talking foodstuffs for human consumption... do you want the unpaid intern sanitizing the bottles you are going to drink out of? Do you want someone with a grudge and no income with access to the wine vats? Just saying... Anywhere else in the country it would seem like a very esoteric enterprise.... here, it's something that is actively-managed.