PROVIDENCE — The daughters in the Rosciti construction family are finding it is not always easy to win the certification necessary to qualify for the tens of millions of contract dollars set aside for minority-owned businesses on most big public works projects.

Christina Rosciti, 33, is the president, and her cousin Jennifer Rosciti, 22, is the vice president/treasurer of the year-old King Philip Corp. The women are seeking certification of the company, which specializes in heavy construction, utilities and equipment rental, as a minority-owned business enterprise.

The two women are, respectively, the daughters of Anthony and Henry Rosciti Sr., the retired principals in Rosciti Construction, of Johnston, and affiliated companies. Their brothers followed their fathers into the other family businesses.

Jennifer Rosciti lives at home with her parents; Christine Rosciti lives in a condo purchased by her father. Neither has paid federal taxes the last three years, according to a state compliance officer’s evaluation of their bid for minority status, which, in turn, would make them eligible for the federal contract dollars set aside for “Disadvantaged Business Enterprises.”

The state’s Minority Business Enterprise Certification Review Committee has scheduled a hearing for Aug. 15 on the application they filed March 22.

Dorinda L. Keene, compliance officer for the review committee, raised “numerous issues of concern” in her report evaluating the application. Among them: “Neither applicant has been able to demonstrate that capital contributions came from personal funds…. It does not appear that the company owned any equipment whatsoever until March 20, 2007.”

And when asked questions about their business, Keene said the women “indicated that all materials and supplies needed for projects are purchased directly from Rosciti Construction, and that the firm does not currently have arrangements or accounts with any materials suppliers directly.”

Keene recommended the hearing to give the Rosciti cousins a chance to address “issues of control, dependency upon non-minority individuals, affiliation with and dependency upon non-minority firms, and the appearance that the firm was created solely to participate in [programs intended for minority-owned businesses].”

“That is her opinion,” Christina Rosciti said in an interview last week.

Noting that her late grandmother Rose was certified as a “minority contractor” before her, along with her “Aunt Donna,” who is Jennifer’s mother and Henry Rosciti’s wife, she said: “We are not a front for my father or my brother or my uncle. I mean, we’re two young girls that want to start a company, that want to carry on a family legacy and it’s straight up. It is what it is…. We know the business like the back of our hand.”

“Of course, we do have the Rosciti family name. We’ll always have the Rosciti name. But I mean, we’re trying to start a business just like anyone else would do, just like any other minority contractor would go and apply for the same thing…. And it’s not a front or a farce as, I think, this report reads.”

The filing draws further attention to the operation, in Rhode Island, of a federally mandated program aimed at giving “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals” a shot at state and federal contract dollars.

The list includes women and those who are black, Hispanic, American Indian, Asian or Portuguese. Each federally assisted project has an assigned minority hiring goal. Federal rules say: “Any female qualifies as a special class of minority.”

A recent lawsuit by the owner of a small trucking company against one of the state’s largest highway contractors, the Cardi Corporation, raised questions about how closely the state Department of Transportation monitors the use of Disadvantaged Business Enterprises, or DBEs, and what those businesses are doing for their share of the money.

Twins Oil owner Michele Grieco alleges that Cardi used her as a front to meet minority hiring requirements on state highway contracts, then shut her out of the jobs and the money. She is seeking her expectation profits — $50,636 — in a breach-of-contract suit pending in Kent County Superior Court.

Grieco did not have a truck capable of delivering the liquid asphalt Cardi hired her to deliver. So, to make good on the four highway and airport contracts in dispute, she says, she had planned to call a non-minority company, the Hudson Terminal Corp., and ask it to make a delivery to one of its largest customers: the Cardi Corp. (Principals in the Hudson company network include former DOT director Matthew Gill.)

Through a spokeswoman, current DOT director Jerome F. Williams said he sees no need for any immediate action on his part to tighten oversight of the program, which is credited, in part, for $40 million in contract commitments and the actual payment of $1.5 million in completed-project dollars to DBEs last year alone.

The $40 million reflected minority-hiring commitments on 125 contracts, of which 9 went to “Black Americans,” 5 to “Hispanic Americans,” 5 to “Asian Pacific Americans,” 56 to a “non-minority woman” and 40 to “other(s),” identified broadly by the DOT as Portuguese business owners.

Against this backdrop, the Minority Business Enterprise Certification Review Committee holds monthly meetings to decide who qualifies. Since June 2005, it has received 153 applications. Of that number, 98 were approved without hearings, another 3 were approved after hearings. With the exception of 12 still pending, the rest were rejected or withdrawn.

Earlier this month, the certification review committee, chaired by Charles Newton, rejected an application from the female president of International Paving, who acknowledged that she works full-time elsewhere while her husband, who has 22 years in the construction industry, runs the day-to-day operations. That same day, the committee voted to hold a hearing on Christina and Jennifer Rosciti’s application.

Both are described as white females, graduates within the last 10 years of Johnson & Wales University — one with degrees in fashion merchandising and business, and the other in marketing and management.

Under previous work experience, Christina described herself as a former office and finance manager for the family-owned Castle Equipment & Supply; and Jennifer, as an administrative assistant at Castle and, before that, at another family-owned company, Parkside Site & Utility, which was sold in 2002. (Christina described her late grandmother as the owner.)

Keene’s report said: “Per the applicants, neither Christina Rosciti nor Jennifer Rosciti has filed personal federal tax returns during the last three years.”

“While they were employed full-time, they received no compensation,” Keene said the women told her.

Asked about this last week, Christina Rosciti said: “Jennifer lives at home because she just got out of college. My father owns this condo.... He allows me to live here but, I mean, we didn’t collect a paycheck. What we did was we worked in the office, and me living here in this house is kind of like my paycheck…. The same thing with Jennifer. My uncle will pay for a credit card bill here and there, give her spending money, but we worked for it. We’re in the office every day.”

As things stand, she said, she has not yet collected a paycheck from her own company, King Philip. But she said the company has two jobs in the wings: one doing water supply board work for the City of Providence, and another working as a subcontractor on a sewer job that Parkside Site & Utility is doing in Groton, Conn. Both hinge, she said, on her company winning minority certification.

At the time of her June 22 site visit, Keene said, “the applicant” indicated that the company had been awarded several earlier contracts, including “a contract with Capco dated 7/1/06 for the Barrington Pump Station.”

But when asked the company’s role in that project, Barrington public works director Alan Corvi told The Providence Journal last week that neither Capco Steel nor the King Philip Corp. has had any role in the $6-million pump station upgrade.

Told this, Christina Rosciti insisted: “We did the job.” She faxed an invoice to The Journal that she said was proof her company had done the work, but Corvi said Rosciti Construction has done no work on the project.

She suggested there may have been confusion about who did the work because “you see, what we do is we lease our employees to Rosciti Construction … but we pay our employees out of King Philip Corporation.”

“When we don’t have work, we lease our employees to Rosciti,” she explained. “Rosciti pays us for them. They are great employees, and we don’t want to lose them, so we try to keep them busy until we get our jobs.”

Keene outlined in her report family ties — now or in the recent past — to more than a dozen affiliated companies, including Rosciti Associates, 43 East Realty Corp., International Beans & Bags, Utility Systems Inc., MSS Auto Sales, AHR Utility Corp., South Shore Utility Contractors, DCAR Realty Holdings, Sydney Construction, HVR Construction, Rosciti Construction, Rosciti Equipment, CityView Mortgage Corp., Earth Reclamation LLC, and until 2002, Parkside Site & Utility and Parkside Utility Construction Corp.

Taking stock of where the King Philip Corp. fit in this family tree, Keene wrote: “It does not appear the company owned any equipment whatsoever until March 20, 2007. All equipment allegedly utilized up to that date was rented or leased from Rosciti Construction and/or Castle.”

When equipment was subsequently purchased from the family-owned MSS Auto Sales, Keene said, the employee signing the paperwork for MSS was also listed as a King Philip employee on that company’s W-2 tax forms.

In her report, Keene also quoted a letter from former House Speaker Joseph DeAngelis that said: “The present employees of the King Philip Corporation were all previously employed by South Shore Utility Contractors … [that] on May 12, 2006 was petitioned into receivership by the Providence County Superior Court.” The only lawyer named in Keene’s lengthy review of King Philip’s finances and business arrangements, DeAngelis said in an interview that he represents the fathers — Anthony and Henry — not their daughters.

Both the application and Keene’s evaluation were the subject of a July 18 public meeting at which the Certification Review Committee, chaired by Newton as the administrator of the Department of Administration’s Minority Business Enterprise compliance office, voted for a hearing.

But Newton has thus far been unwilling to make the application itself public. While unable to cite a law barring him from doing so, he said he was “uncomfortable releasing an open application.”

kgregg@projo.com