I would never have thought of this one!
Posted on 15-Nov-07 by The Timekeeper
From the “it can pay to read all the way to the end of the article” department:
A recent article on the HR.BLR.com site reported on a presentation given by attorney Marjorie S. Fochtman of Nixon Peabody LLP at BLR’s 2007 Employment Law Update conference.
Most of the article is stuff most of y’all have probably heard before. Well, at least, stuff I’ve heard before… For instance, about how you have to pay people for activities before or after their actual start of work if those activities are “integral and indespensible” to their main job. Things like booting up a computer before you can start work, or the infamous “donning and doffing” lawsuits in the meatpacking industry. And some discussion of the regulations related to breaks and meal periods.
But the bit that made the entire article worthwhile reading (for me, at least) was waaay down at the bottom.
A wage and hour compliance audit is usually a good thing — helps make sure you’re on the right side of the law before the DOL comes a-knockin’ — but Ms. Fochtman advised if you decide to conduct one, have it done by an attorney. This makes it a privileged audit, which cannot be called as evidence in the event violations are uncovered.
Wow. I confess, I would never have thought of that!
Having your own wage and hour compliance audit used as evidence against you would be a major bummer, to say the least. So have your attorney conduct your audit and make sure the results stay “in the family.”
Just make sure you clean up any violations the audit uncovers. (I mean, duh. That’s sort of the point of conducting the audit in the first place, right?) Keep in mind, just because the audit is “privileged” doesn’t mean the violations can’t be uncovered independently by other means (such as being reported to the authorities by one of your more savvy employees). Until you correct the situation, you’re vulnerable.
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[...] develop your overall compliance program, when it comes to the actual audit you might want to ponder this bit of advice I ran across recently, and consider hiring a lawyer for the audit itself so as to maintain attorney-client privilege [...]