Stonington Institute Assessed Over $1million in Back Wages
Posted on 18-Jul-07 by The Timekeeper
Without admitting wrongdoing, the Stonington Institute and its parent companies have agreed to pay $1,075,218 in overdue wages to 149 current and former employees, plus $49,156 in civil penalties. This agreement settles a lawsuit brought by the US DOL against Stonington Behavioral Health, located in Connecticut, management company UHS of Delaware Inc. and the parent company Universal Health Services Inc., based in Pennsylvania.
Individual employees will receive anywhere from $49,932 to as little as $106 under the terms of the settlement.
According to a press release issued by John M. Chavez, a DOL spokesman, an investigation conducted by the department’s Wage and Hour Division district office in Hartford showed that “full-time employees who worked with substance-abuse patients living in the company’s sober houses routinely worked unpaid, unrecorded hours and were thereby paid less than the mandatory federal minimum and overtime wages.”
The lawsuit filed by the DOL alleged the institute, a psychiatric and substance-abuse treatment facility for adults and adolescents, violated the federal Fair Labor Standards Act by paying employees less than the applicable minimum wage; not paying employees appropriate overtime; and by failing to keep proper records of employees’ wages and hours.
Yet another allegation of failing to keep proper records of employees’ wages and hours. *sigh*
There are so many alternatives available for tracking time and attendance… traditional time cards or time sheets, computer time clocks, web-based time tracking… I try to be sympathetic, but to find yourself paying over a million dollars in back wages and nearly $50,000 in fines because you can’t keep track of how long your employees are working? Folks, this is just so unnecessary!
I’m sorry, but that just makes no sense to me. If you think it’s too expensive to install time clocks or time and attendance software, consider the potential alternatives. You can get a state of the art time tracking system that would work great for a small business for a whole lot less than $50,000, you know.
So I guess you’ve gotta ask yourself: would you rather pay a few thousand (or less) to set up an accurate time and attendance tracking process? Or would you rather pay tens of thousands (or more) in fines to the US DOL?
Your choice.
No Comments
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
