Reminder: Wage Theft Prevention Act Annual Notices Must Be Issued to Employees By February 1, January 1, 2013.

January 8, 2013

By: Subhash Viswanathan

Employers who have employees in New York are required to issue annual notices under the Wage Theft Prevention Act ("WTPA") to all New York employees between January 1 and February 1, 2013.  Although a bill was introduced in the New York State Legislature to repeal the annual notice requirement in early 2012 (which was the first year that the annual notice requirement was in effect), the bill passed in the Senate but remains dormant in the Assembly.  Therefore, the WTPA annual notice requirement continues to be in effect.

As we have summarized in previous blog posts, the annual notice must contain the following information:

• the employee's rate or rates of pay (for non-exempt employees, this must include both the regular rate and overtime rate);
• the employee's basis of pay (e.g., hourly, shift, day, week, salary, piece, commission, or other);
• allowances, if any, claimed as part of the minimum wage (e.g., tips, meals, lodging);
• the regular pay day; and
• the name (including any "doing business as" name), address, and telephone number of the employer.

The annual notice must be provided to each employee in English and in the primary language identified by each employee, if the New York State Department of Labor ("NYSDOL") has prepared a dual-language form for the language identified by the employee.  At this point, the NYSDOL has prepared dual-language forms in Chinese, Haitian Creole, Korean, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.  The English-only and dual-language forms created by the NYSDOL are available on the NYSDOL's web site.  If an employee identifies a primary language other than one of the six languages for which a dual-language form is available, the employer may provide the annual notice in English only.  Employers are not required to use the NYSDOL's forms, but employers who create their own forms must be sure that all of the information required by the WTPA is included.

Employers are required to obtain a signed acknowledgment of receipt of the annual notice from each employee.  The acknowledgment must include an affirmation by the employee that the employee accurately identified to the employer his/her primary language, and that the notice was in the language so identified.  Signed acknowledgments must be maintained for at least six years.