Denver Auditor’s Office says it recovered $2.1 million in unpaid wages for workers in the last year

The Denver Auditor’s Office collected more than $2 million in wages illegally withheld from workers during the office’s 2024 fiscal year, officials said this week.

The record final tally of dollars recovered for workers whose employers did not pay wages they were owed was $2.07 million, according to a news release put out Wednesday by the independent wing of city government. That was based on the period from November 2023 through the end of October.

The amount slightly exceeded the $2.04 million total the auditor’s Denver Labor office recovered during its 2023 reporting year.

The office recovered wages on behalf of 4,505 workers — another record that eclipsed the 2023 total by more than 1,000 people, according to the office.

“These outcomes compel us to continue our efforts for the thousands of individuals who still need our help,” Denver Auditor Tim O’Brien said in a statement. “Whether an individual receives hundreds or thousands of dollars in restitution, that’s money that should have been in their pocket on payday to pay their bills and support their families.”

In 2022, the Denver Labor office also set a record for recovered dollars with $1.1 million. The near-doubling of that total in each of the last two years came on the heels of the Denver City Council’s passage of a civil wage theft ordinance in January 2023.

That ordinance gave the office the power to levy heavy fines and charge 12% interest on unpaid wages if violations of pay laws were found.

Among the 753 cases that Denver Labor closed last year that ended in restitution payments, a vast majority — 694 — dealt with mispayments of prevailing wages, according to the news release. Prevailing wages are minimum pay levels that the city sets for contractors and subcontractors performing work on public buildings or on behalf of the city; they are higher than the minimum wage in other situations.

The auditor’s office highlighted a large prevailing wage determination against Urban Peak, the city’s primary youth homeless shelter provider, in Wednesday’s release, without identifying a specific total.

The nonprofit completed work earlier this year on a new 60,000-square-foot shelter on South Acoma Street. But the auditor’s office found workers were underpaid for their work on the building because it was misclassified as a residential project instead of a more commercially focused “building” project.

Projects with the latter classification come with a higher prevailing wage once city funding is involved. Urban Peak officials said a miscommunication led to the underpayment and they always intended to pay workers fairly.

The council has since further beefed up the office’s powers. In April, the body voted to grant Denver Labor the authority to issue subpoenas to obtain records from uncooperative employers in wage-theft investigations.

In September, the office issued subpoenas to three strip clubs — PT’s Showclub, Diamond Cabaret and PT’s Centerfold — to determine if those establishments were misclassifying dancers as nonemployees to avoid paying them minimum wage and overtime and providing paid sick leave.

“This year, new research showed a great need for wage enforcement across the city,” Matthew Fritz-Mauer, the executive director of Denver Labor, said in the release. “We now have subpoena power to help us get the information we need in investigations, but there are still a lot more people who need our help.”

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