Willow Grove Healthcare Company Owes $3.8M To Employees It Failed To Pay: Feds

WILLOW GROVE, PA — A Montgomery County home healthcare company owes millions of dollars to hundreds of its employees whom it failed to pay, according to investigators. Many of the victims were making very low wages or minimum wage.

Willow Grove-based Trimed HealthCare "intentionally denied" full overtime wages to 433 of its employees, the U.S. Department of Labor said. The company must pay $3.8 million in back wages and liquidated damages, a federal court ruled this week

“This is a significant recovery of back wages and liquidated damages for people who typically work for low wages and often struggle to make ends meet,” Labor's Principal Deputy Wage and Hour Administrator Jessica Looman said in a statement. “Employers must understand that federal law requires them to respect workers’ rights to be paid all of their earned wages, and that we will investigate those who fail to meet their obligations.”

To avoid paying employees proper overtime, employers lowered the rate of pay for employees in weeks in which they worked more than 40 hours, investigators found. By doing so, they withheld enormous amounts and concealed their violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Trimed also failed to pay direct care workers for travel time, did not keep proper records, and paid other workers for regular time despite the fact they were working overtime, officials said.

On their website, Trimed says they provide "non-medical home care services to consumers who are in need of assistance in their own homes and communities," adding that their goal is "to maintain or retain (a patient's) feeling of independence and well being."

Employees include registered nurses, certified nurse assistants, patient care aides, home health aides, and more.

“Employers who intentionally disregard the law and fail to pay workers their hard-earned wages will find that we will use every tool available, including enforcement actions in federal court, to hold them accountable,” Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda added in a statement.

Trimed has patients in Bucks, Montgomery, Northampton, Delaware, Chester, Lehigh, and Philadelphia counties.

Some $14.9 million in back wages for more than 22,000 healthcare workers was recovered by the Department of Labor's lawsuits in 2022.