Disgraced Ex-SF Building Commissioner Fined $1.4 Million for Fraud

Former San Francisco official Rodrigo Santos and his associates will pay the city a settlement of $1.4 million — two years after the structural engineer was sentenced to 30 months in prison for defrauding clients and forging building permits and other documents, City Attorney David Chiu announced Thursday.

The settlement marks the end of a yearslong saga involving lawsuits, a criminal investigation and Santos’ “elaborate scheme” to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from the city and customers in his capacity as a building commissioner, officials said.

“Rodrigo Santos defrauded his clients and the City,” Chiu said in a statement. “Santos aided and abetted unauthorized excavations, creating safety hazards and putting his clients and their neighbors at risk. And, Santos profited significantly from all of this illegal conduct. This settlement brings accountability to the matter.”

Santos, who previously served as president of the city’s Building Inspection Commission, is also barred from holding an engineering license for five years, Chiu added.

The City Attorney’s Office filed a lawsuit against Santos, Albert Urrutia and their construction firm in 2018 after city investigators discovered that they had defrauded the city by submitting false building plans, worked with unlicensed contractors and endangered civilians by excavating under San Francisco homes without permits to avoid regulatory oversight and to speed up building processes.

Santos also stole over $400,000 from his clients over the course of three years by instructing them to sign blank checks addressed to city departments, according to Chiu’s office. He would later fill in dollar amounts and deposit the checks into his personal accounts by altering payee information to reflect his name — checks addressed to “DBI,” or the Department of Building Inspection, were altered to read “RODBIGO SANTOS.”

An investigator in the City Attorney’s Office was the first to discover the check fraud, prompting a criminal investigation into Santos’ shady business dealings.

He was charged with various crimes, including bank fraud and interfering in a federal investigation, and pleaded guilty in federal court to bank fraud, honest services fraud, tax evasion amounting to $1.6 million and falsifying records, according to federal officials. Santos was sentenced to 30 months in prison in 2023, and he has since completed his sentence.

A city official confirmed that some of Santos’ victims were able to receive restitution through the criminal case. The city found other individuals who Santos defrauded to be allegedly complicit in Santos’ illegal activity. One of those clients, Kevin O’ Connor, is awaiting a court decision in his civil trial.

“Our office was really looking forward to this long-standing lawsuit and investigation ending,” said Alex Barrett-Shorter, a spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office. “We’re really proud of the many people in our office who worked on this and who even uncovered this in the first place.”

San Francisco is currently facing a projected budget shortfall of more than $800 million for fiscal years 2026 and 2027.

Barrett-Shorter confirmed that while the lawsuit and settlement involving Santos have been in the works for years and are unrelated to the city’s financial troubles, the money will go toward the city’s dwindling budget as “penalties and fees for the harm that [Santos] has caused the city.”

As part of the settlement, Santos and his associates are required to pay the city $250,000 within 30 days and monthly installments of $33,571 over the next three years.