Federal employees beware; the next time you receive a call from an "annoying citizen," it's best to treat them fairly and in a timely manner as it may actually be the government calling.
Recently, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress's investigative watchdog agency, launched an undercover investigation at the Department of Labor to determine just how bad things were at the Agency's Wage and Hour Division (WHD). GAO employees posed as average citizens reporting employee and child labor violations as a follow-up to a Congressional hearing this past summer in which the GAO reported that WHD had "inadequately responded to complaints from low wage workers who alleged that employers failed to pay the federal minimum wage and required overtime."
The mission of DOL's Wage and Hour Division includes
enforcing labor laws designed
to ensure that millions of workers are paid the federal minimum wage,
overtime pay, and benefits promised, and that young children are not forced to work.
In their initial investigation of the program last year, GAO found cases where WHD "inappropriately rejected complaints based on incorrect information provided by employers, failed to make adequate attempts to locate
employers, did not thoroughly investigate and resolve complaints, and
delayed the initiation of investigations for over a year."
The follow-up undercover investigation, in which GAO employees placed 10 fictitious calls into WHD investigators, found similar problems. In one instance, WHD failed to investigate a child labor complaint alleging that underage children were operating hazardous machinery and working during school hours. In another case, a WHD investigator lied to the undercover investigator about confirming the fictitious businesses’ sales volume with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and did not investigate any further.
One Labor official told a GAO agent complaining he hadn't received overtime pay for 19 weeks that, "We're not even going to be starting an
investigation until eight to ten months." WHD subsequently failed to return four calls over four consecutive
months from the fictitious employee attempting to determine the status of his complaint. And as it turns out, the complaint was never even recorded in the complaint database.
After all was said and done, over the course of the six month investigation, WHD only successfully investigated one of the 10
fictitious cases. Five of the 10 complaints were not even recorded in WHD’s database, and two of 10 were erroneously recorded as successfully paid when in fact the fictitious complainants reported to WHD they had not been paid.
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