Nine Years Later, Nassau Collected the Wages
A 2017 wage judgment against the owner of Westbury Fish was finally collected this June. For Long Island employers, the lesson is that it never expired.
By Melville Chamber of Commerce ·
On January 18, 2017, Richard Scores, the owner of Westbury Fish, pleaded guilty to offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree, a class E felony, and to failure to pay wages under the New York State Labor Law, a violation. He was sentenced to probation and ordered to pay restitution to his employees, along with nearly 24,000 dollars to the state Department of Labor for unpaid unemployment insurance contributions.
He did not pay. According to the Nassau County District Attorney's office, he violated that order for years and refused to make restitution. In June of this year, following a joint investigation with the United States Department of Labor, the office recovered more than 435,000 dollars in unpaid wages owed to 38 employees. It got there by moving against his assets to satisfy the outstanding judgment.
More than nine years separated the guilty plea from the money reaching the workers, and the office described the collection as the end of a years long effort by the owner to avoid paying. The lesson for anyone running a business with a payroll is not the size of the check. It is that the clock never ran out.
A wage judgment does not age off
Most compliance exposure a small employer carries has a natural end date. Tax assessments have collection periods. Civil claims have statutes of limitation. Insurance policies expire and the exposure underneath them goes with them.
A criminal restitution order is a different instrument. It is a court judgment carrying the enforcement machinery of the county behind it, and it can be executed against property, accounts and receivables long after the sentence itself is served and forgotten. In this case the prosecutor's office did not need a new case, a new charge, or a new plea. It needed a judgment that was already sitting there, and the patience to keep collecting on it.
The pairing of charges is also worth reading. Failure to pay wages under the Labor Law is a violation, the lowest tier in New York, and on its own it would be a modest matter. Offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree is a felony, and it is the charge that attaches when the paperwork submitted to a state agency does not match what actually happened on the payroll. Wage cases become serious cases when the filings are wrong, not simply when the wages are short.
The rest of the year in Nassau
The Westbury Fish collection was not an isolated action. The district attorney's office says that it and its partners in labor enforcement returned close to 650,000 dollars to 138 Nassau County workers this year.
Two of the other resolutions show what the routine version looks like, and neither involved a prosecution. On June 4, a company repaid more than 60,000 dollars to 30 construction workers after failing to pay time and a half for overtime, under a non prosecution agreement. On June 16, a contractor paid 35,000 dollars to 25 employees after the office found it had not paid the correct prevailing wage rate on several Nassau County projects, again without charges being filed.
Those two matters describe the two most common ways an otherwise honest Long Island employer ends up owing money it did not know it owed. The first is overtime. Paying a fixed weekly salary to someone who is not exempt does not eliminate the obligation to pay time and a half past forty hours, and the arithmetic that proves the shortfall is the employer's own timekeeping. The second is prevailing wage, which applies to public work and carries its own schedule of rates and supplements by trade and county. A contractor who bids a public job at private sector labor rates has built the underpayment into the bid.
The non prosecution agreements are the more useful signal in that list. They indicate an enforcement posture where paying the workers quickly is treated as the outcome, and where an employer that fixes the number is not automatically prosecuted for it. The employer in the Westbury Fish matter took the other route, and the office spent the better part of a decade collecting anyway.
What it means for members
Pull your payroll records for anyone paid a flat salary who is not clearly exempt, and check the hours actually worked against forty, because unpaid overtime is the single most common wage exposure on Long Island and the proof of it lives in your own records rather than anyone else's. If you bid public work, confirm you are using the current prevailing wage schedule for the county and trade rather than last year's, since the correction arrives as back pay to every worker on the job. And if you already owe wages from a prior dispute, settle the number now: this office has just demonstrated that it will collect a nine year old judgment out of assets, and the amount does not shrink while you wait.
