Payday Loan Company Resolves Employment Payment Dispute
By J.J. CameronPayday Loan Writer
A payday loan company based in Overland Park has paid $519,088 to resolve an investigation into overtime pay violations.
The Kansas City Star reported that The U.S. Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division said QC Financial Inc. owed back pay to about 900 employees. Thse professionals finally received checks - covering the amounts owed them, which ranged from $22.08 to $3,589.29 per worker - based on pay that had been withheld from them for extra work.
Wage and Hour investigators reviewed the quick payday loan company’s pay practices from Jan. 1, 2004, to March 31, 2006, and found violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
“We cooperated with the Department of Labor investigation, and our agreement to pay overtime wages results from a 2004 change in the way the department categorizes managers at our smaller branch locations,” said Frances King, human resources director at QC Holdings Inc.
QC Financial is a wholly owned subsidiary of QC Holdings, which went public two years ago. Deann Alvarado, acting district director for Wage and Hour in the Kansas City area, said the case involved failure to pay time-and-a-half overtime pay to nonexempt salaried managers for time worked beyond 40-hour workweeks.
She said the payday advance company also failed to include bonuses when calculating overtime pay due nonexempt salaried and hourly workers. Generally, the law requires that nondiscretionary bonuses be included in calculations to determine pay rates for the purposes of calculating overtime. The company now pays overtime to all its branch managers, King said.
QC Financial employs more than 1,000 people in more than 550 business locations in 25 states. It began in the pay day loan business in 1992 and is one of the largest companies operating in that industry.
