Bad Business Can = No Business
Posted on 26-May-09 by The Timekeeper
From the Home Care Law Blog comes a timely warning: the DOL is stepping up enforcement of wage and hour laws (which should come as no surprise to regular readers here). Given that home health care workers typically have wage and hour concerns that are a bit more complex than those of in-office workers — such as: do you pay for travel time? — any company offering home health care services would do well to consult with a qualified employment law advisor to make sure they’re on the right side of the rules.
And not just home health care agencies. If you have a workforce who work on-site at customer locations, you face many of the same sorts of issues. Lawn maintenance companies, home/office cleaning services, exterminators, locksmiths, handyman services, plumbers, electricians… I can think of a whole bunch of service-industry companies whose employees might end up spending all or most of their time “out of the office.”
And from the Wicked Local website (Tewksbury edition) comes a story that illustrates just why this is so important.
Seems a local business, Excel Home Care Inc. was actually shut down by a temporary “stop work” order issued by the state of Massachusetts due to unpaid back wages and fines.
The company had been assessed back wages as the result of a investigation that revealed they hadn’t paid 15 people properly for the work they’d done. The company was supposed to pay the wages to the employees, which they did — for five of the affected employees. But they failed to pay the monies owed to 10 employees. So the state’s Attorney General cited the company for failing to pay employees on a timely basis and failing to provide proper pay stubs, imposed fines and issued a temporary a stop work order…
…which apparently got the company’s attention.
I’m sure there was something of a scramble to make sure the company’s 150 clients were taken care of by other home health care companies while the matter was resolved.
The stop work order was lifted within the week after the company showed evidence of a new insurance policy and cut the state a check for $6,500 toward the fines imposed. The thing is, they apparently only owed around $14,300 in back wages (of which about $6,500 had already been paid), but the new $14,000 in fines that were imposed because they didn’t pay the wages on a timely basis effectively doubled the amount the company owes.
Ouch.
So unless you can afford to have your business shut down until you pay up, it might be easier in the long run (and the short run, for that matter) to simply make sure you’ve paid people properly to start with, eh?
It’s time to talk to your attorney, folks. Seriously. Even if you think you’re doing everything right, it never hurts to make sure.
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