Compliance Stuff

For most of my career, enterprise trust has worked one way: you prove you’re trustworthy by writing it down. Policies, audit reports, screenshots, certifications. Produce enough paperwork showing your controls exist and work, and you’ve shown you can be trusted . That worked for a long time, for one reason: the paperwork could keep up. Software shipped a few times a year, infrastructure sat still for months, and proving you were compliant once a year was a fair stand-in for being secure the other 364 days. But the systems we govern today look very different from the ones that shaped this model. We’re auditing a photo of a moving car Today, infrastructure spins up and tears itself down automatically. Teams ship to production dozens of times a day. Models get retrained, prompts drift, agents do work people used to. Modern systems are built to move, yet most of how we prove trust still assumes they’ll hold still long enough to pose for a photo. This creates a growing challenge at the hear...

Employers around the country need to comply with a growing patchwork of laws on fair pay, pay data reporting, and transparency in job ads and the hiring process. Compliance has become increasingly complex as more states and cities pass their own nuanced requirements that vary from location to location, and the stakes are getting higher as the penalties for violations rise. Here’s an overview of key federal, state, and local pay equity trends, as well as practical tips for compliance. Quick Overview of Federal and State Equal Pay Laws Purpose:  The goal of pay equity and transparency laws is to close pay gaps and give employees more information to understand how their compensation compares to their peers and the market, and in turn, more power to correct past inequities based on gender, race, and other characteristics. Themes:  For over sixty years, the federal Equal Pay Act has required equal pay for men and women for substantially equal work. Many states have built on the fe...

Five employee complaints triggered an investigation by the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE) that ultimately resulted in more than $215,000 in wage liability—an outcome that illustrates why employers should periodically conduct wage-and-hour self-audits. Many employers assume that if payroll is running smoothly and employees are being paid on time, their wage-and-hour practices must be complian t. Unfortunately, wage-and-hour laws are highly technical, and even well-intentioned employers can get them wrong. We recently heard from a prospective client who learned this lesson the hard way. What began as complaints from a few employees quickly turned into an extensive investigation that expanded far beyond the original complaint. Situations like this illustrate why conducting a periodic wage-and-hour self-audit can be one of the most effective ways to identify compliance issues before regulators do. When a Small Complaint Becomes a Big Problem The employer contacte...

A Pennsylvania federal court dealt a blow to staffing firms that classify recruiters as exempt from overtime, ruling that a staffing firm must provide their IT recruiters overtime pay because they perform “routine sales production work” rather than administrative duties. The February 11 decision in  Thomas v. TEKsystems, Inc.  marks the second federal court in recent years to reject the administrative exemption for recruiters at the same company, and raises serious questions about whether staffing firms across the industry have been misclassifying their own workers for years . Here’s what staffing companies need to know about this decision and four steps to help your wage and hour compliance efforts. The Decision: Recruiters Are Producers, Not Administrators In  Thomas v. TEKsystems , seven former recruiters sued their employer, alleging the IT staffing firm misclassified them as exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime requirements . US District Judge William...

A new class action lawsuit against an AI recruiting platform could have significant implications for employers using artificial intelligence to screen job candidates. Two job applicants filed suit against Eightfold AI in California state court on January 20, alleging that the company violated federal and state consumer protection laws by creating “hidden credit reports” on job seekers without complying with statutory requirements imposed on consumer reporting agencies, including obtaining proper certifications from employment-purposed end-users . While we’ve started to see a series of lawsuits across the country attacking AI hiring systems for alleged discrimination, this could be the first to take the position that an AI tool could lead to a FCRA violation. Here’s what employers need to know about this developing legal challenge and five key takeaways to help protect your organization. The Allegations: AI Screening Tools as “Consumer Reports” The lawsuit, filed by Erin Kistler and Sru...