FLSA Violation Research

Overview

Unpaid overtime, regular rate miscalculations, FLSA exemption misclassification, and minimum wage violations are typical allegations in FLSA lawsuits. Payroll and time data tabulations are often key evidence in these types of wage and hour lawsuits.

Some employers find self-audits of its FLSA compliance valuable even without a lawsuit being filed. We perform statistical and economic data tabulations in wage and hour lawsuits and for employer self-audits.

Overtime

Allegations of unpaid overtime occur in many different types of FLSA and wage and hour lawsuits. In some instances, unpaid overtime is alleged to be the result of an incorrect overtime exemption determination made by the employer.

In other instances, the unpaid overtime is alleged to be the result of uncompensated off-the-clock work that would have resulted in overtime pay for the employee.

In these cases, we combine time punch data, payroll records, and court documents to analyze the alleged unpaid overtime due to the plaintiffs. We have extensive experience analyzing unpaid overtime allegations in large collective and class actions.

FLSA Violation

Plaintiffs in FLSA exemption lawsuits generally allege that they are incorrectly classified as exempt from overtime pay. Analyses of employment information such as time clock records, employee work schedules, and payroll records are often used to study potential FLSA overtime exemption violations.

The employment data can be used to create tabulations that provide insights on issues related to various FLSA exemptions tests. Our analysis can also provide insights into the commonality, typicality, and numerosity issues that arise in collective and class actions.

The analyses of potential FLSA overtime exemption violations may involve matching data from multiple employment, time and payroll data management systems. Representative employee sampling may also be useful in these types of cases.

Wage Rates

Employees in some FLSA cases allege that the regular rate used in their overtime pay is miscalculated. In these types of FLSA cases, employees typically allege that the employer’s regular rate improperly calculates their total compensation.
Our analyses in these types of FLSA cases typically involves regular rate re-calculations, unpaid overtime calculations, and tabulations of employment information obtained from multiple data systems.

In other cases, plaintiffs allege that the employer’s pay policies resulted in the employees earning less than the required minimum wage rate. These types of allegations are most typical for employers with piece rate pay systems that compensate the employee by the production unit. In these types of cases our analysis generally involves analyzing the data of multiple employees.

Our analyses can be used to provide insights into class and collective issues such as commonality and typicality. Representative employee sampling is sometimes used in these types of cases.

Representative

In some FLSA cases, the employee time punch records do not provide adequate information concerning the employee’s work day and the alleged off-the-clock work activity. In these instances it is often useful to use a representative sample of employees to analyze the off-the-clock work that led to the alleged unpaid overtime.
Representative sampling may also be useful in minimum wage cases.

Generally, representative sampling can be used to draw a group of employees whose experiences can be extrapolated to the universe of employees in the class or collective action.

Declarations, affidavits, or survey evidence can be obtained from the individuals regarding the frequency of the alleged FLSA violations.

Our staff is experienced and proficient at performing statistical representative sampling. We provide calculations and tabulations that are insightful and well documented.