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Your Employer Might Owe You Money — Here’s How to Find Out
By Pete Grieve MONEY RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
The average amount paid to workers owed back wages last year was about $1,300.
Does your company owe you back wages? A government agency just sent out a reminder on social media about an online resource you can use to see if an employer owes you money.
The Department of Labor’s Workers Owed Wages tool lets you look up the name of an employer to see if it owes back wages to employees. Last fiscal year, the system helped send $26.9 million to workers.
The department’s Wage and Hour division is responsible for enforcing federal labor laws, and its investigations can result in workers’ being owed money for employer violations. For example, an employer can be required to pay back wages if it wasn’t properly compensating employees for overtime hours.
While the Department of Labor says it works hard to try to contact people who are owed money, there are instances when it’s unable to locate an individual.
In one of the largest recent cases, Philadelphia-based company U.S. Medical Staffing was ordered to pay more than $9 million in back wages and damages to about 1,700 workers. (That judgement came out in 2022, but employees were still owed over $2.7 million as of December, according to USA Today.)
The department will hold unclaimed funds for three years, but after that it sends the money to the U.S. Treasury.
Anyone who suspects that a current or former employer owes them money is encouraged to use the search tool. Doing a search only takes a few moments, and it can be worthwhile. Last year, the average amount disbursed to workers owed back wages was about $1,300.
How to find back wages and unclaimed money
The Department of Labor’s online tool is simple to use: First, enter your employer’s name to see if it show up in the database. If it does, enter your name to check if you’re owed back wages. Lastly, follow the remaining instructions and send any necessary documents to finalize your claim. If you have trouble locating unpaid wages, you can call the Wage and Hour division at 1-866-487-9243 for assistance.
The Workers Owed Wages tool isn’t the only government website that can help you find money under your name. You can continue your search for unclaimed funds using the Treasury Hunt search tool, which can locate unpaid Treasury Securities and missing interest. You can also search state treasury websites to see if they have any unclaimed assets that you can claim.
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Pete Grieve is a New York-based reporter who covers personal finance news. At Money, Pete covers trending stories that affect Americans’ wallets on topics including car buying, insurance, housing, credit cards, retirement and taxes. He studied political science and photography at the University of Chicago, where he was editor-in-chief of The Chicago Maroon. Pete began his career as a professional journalist in 2019. Prior to joining Money, he was a health reporter for Spectrum News in Ohio, where he wrote digital stories and appeared on TV to provide coverage to a statewide audience. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times and CNN Politics. Pete received extensive journalism training through Report for America, a nonprofit organization that places reporters in newsrooms to cover underreported issues and communities, and he attended the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in 2021. Pete has discussed his reporting in interviews with outlets including the Columbia Journalism Review and WBEZ (Chicago's NPR station). He’s been a panelist at the Chicago Headline Club’s FOIA Fest and he received the Institute on Political Journalism’s $2,500 Award for Excellence in Collegiate Reporting in 2017. An essay he wrote for Grey City magazine was published in a 2020 book, Remembering J. Z. Smith: A Career and its Consequence.