Commencing this year, one of my new management tasks at our law firm will be to conduct staff reviews.  We have a wonderful, experienced staff, and I am looking forward to meeting with all of them in the coming days.  It has been our practice to provide our employees with a written document setting forth each employee’s rate of pay and other information at the time of this review.  While this is good practice, it is also now the law.  I thought I’d take the time to write a short post to remind employers what the requirements are in New York.

As I prepared for my new role, I reviewed the requirements and model forms, which must be provided to all employees annually on or before February 1.  We previously wrote about those requirements in a series of articles on our firm’s website, and rather than repeat them, I will include links below.  The article about the forms also contains links directly to the state’s model forms, which can also be found on the Department of Labor website.

Here are links to our previous series of articles on the Wage Theft Prevention Act and its notice requirements:

New Notice Requirements for New York Employers

Expanded Notice and record Keeping Requirements for New York Employers

New York Enhances Penalties for Failure to Comply with Labor Law

Wage Theft Prevention Act Model Notices Issued by the NYS Department of Labor

The Albany Business Review recently reported here that the Business Council of New York estimated that the private sector spends $50 million a year complying with this notice provision.  The same article also reported that the Executive Deputy Commissioner of Labor testified at a hearing in November, that even though Department of Labor investigators have processed roughly 7,000 new cases since the law was enacted three years ago, none of the complaints cited the annual notice requirement.

While the notice provision continues to be criticized, efforts to eliminate it have not passed the legislature (yet?).  So, for now, each employer in New York must continue to provide this annual notice before February 1, as I will do later this week.