Home Health & Hospice Week

Courts aren’t afraid to levy big CMPs for ‘willful violations.’

A Virginia home care agency is learning the hard way that it can’t skirt overtime laws.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia has directed 1st Adult & Pediatrics Healthcare Services Inc. in Fairfax and its owners to pay more than $1.6 million in back wages and liquidated damages to 202 home health aides, the Department of Labor says in a release. The federal court found that the agency and owners Carolyn Bryant-Taylor and Kafomdi Josephine Okocha denied workers overtime wages by paying them straight-time rates for all hours worked, including hours over 40 in a workweek. The employers also didn’t keep required payroll records.

When confronted with the DOL’s findings, the agency and owners still refused to pay, so the DOL Office of the Regional Solicitor filed suit to recover the monies owed, DOL says. The employers must pay $834,782 in back wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages to the workers, as well as $48,675 in civil money penalties to the department “for their intentional violations,” according to the release.

“The U.S. Department of Labor will hold employers who fail to comply willfully with the Fair Labor Standards Act legally accountable,” Deputy Regional Solicitor Samantha Thomas says in the release. “The outcome of this investigation and litigation should send a clear signal to other home healthcare industry employers that we will not tolerate employees being shortchanged by illegal pay practices,” Thomas warns.

Meanwhile in New Hampshire, another home care agency recently paid $1 million in a similar wage case, the DOL announced earlier this month.

Between April 2020 and August 2022, Your Comfort Zone Inc. and its president, Rosalind Godfrey, paid home care workers in New Hampshire and Vermont straight-time rates for the workers’ hours over 40 in a workweek, DOL says in a separate release. The employer has paid $950,000 in back wages and liquidated damages and $50,000 in punitive damages, plus $36,324 in civil money penalties for willful violations.

It wasn’t Comfort Zone and Godfrey’s first violations. They paid $100,055 in overtime wages owed to 25 employees as a result of two 2018 investigations. “The division later learned the employer allegedly coerced some affected workers into kicking back the money,” the DOL says.

“The Wage and Hour Division does not tolerate employers repeatedly or willfully violating the rights of workers to be paid their full wages,” Wage and Hour Division District Director Steven McKinney says in the release. “We will use every enforcement tool we have to recover workers’ wages and bring serial violators like these into compliance.”