Thousands of Pa. workers are owed money from wage theft cases but the U.S. Labor Dept. says it can’t find them. So we did.

» READ MORE: Did you work at any of these 260 Pa. companies? If so, you could be owed thousands of dollars.

In March 2022, a federal court ordered an Upper Darby home-care agency to pay more than $4.5 million in back wages and damages to more than 500 workers after federal investigators showed that the agency had misclassified those workers as independent contractors and failed to pay them overtime.

The agency, Successful Aging Care Net, got on a payment plan.

More than two years later, the company says it just paid its final installment to the U.S. Department of Labor. But hundreds of workers still haven’t gotten their checks, The Inquirer has found. The federal labor department is holding nearly $2 million for these workers, but says it’s struggling to find them.

It took just a few minutes for The Inquirer to find Raheem Mosley, one of the workers who was owed a lot of money. The Inquirer found his name, and others, on federal court records.

Reached by phone after The Inquirer retrieved his number from LexisNexis, a widely used commercial lookup tool, Mosley, 42, of West Philadelphia, said a woman had called a few years ago about the case and told him he was owed money, but didn’t tell him how much.

Later, he heard from a coworker who had gotten paid from the case. When Mosley asked the home-care agency earlier this year whether he was due any money, he says, he was told no.

That wasn’t true.

According to court records, Mosley, who was paid $13 an hour to care for his cousin at home, was owed more than $99,000. Half of that is back wages, the other half is damages.

“Wow,” said Mosley, who worked at the agency since 2015 until a few weeks ago. “Oh, my gosh. How did I get none of that money?”

Mosley is just one of thousands of low-wage workers in Pennsylvania who haven’t gotten their money from federal wage-theft cases. Right now, the U.S. Department of Labor is holding more than $18 million for more than 9,000 workers in the state who are owed money, and that’s just payments that were made in the last three years.

Once three years pass after an employer pays a settlement, workers can no longer get their money, according to a department spokesperson. The Department of Labor sends their recovered wages to the U.S. Treasury Department’s general fund.

Search our online tool below to see whether your former employer has paid a wage theft settlement in the last three years. If you find your employer, use this Department of Labor website to see whether you’re owed money and to request it.

Innocent Onwubiko, owner of Successful Aging Care Net, said he had been making payments to the Department of Labor for months and was shocked to hear that hundreds of workers had yet to be paid.

“Wow,” he said, adding that “we were not asked to contact anybody” regarding the payments and that he was told the Department of Labor would handle that.

Onwubiko said he did not pay overtime because the state did not pay his company extra for overtime, which has been a common issue for home-care companies in Pennsylvania.

» READ MORE: A Philly restaurant owner agreed to pay $1 million to settle a federal wage theft case. Four years later, where’s the money?

The Department of Labor is currently holding payments from more than 260 Pennsylvania employers: home-care agencies, grocery stores, and restaurants, including Devil’s Alley, Bottle Bar East, and Iovine Brothers Produce.

The employer with the most workers who have yet to be paid is U.S. Medical Staffing, a Center City health-care personnel provider ordered to pay $9.3 million in back wages and damages in 2022 to 1,750 employees after it failed to pay overtime. More than two-thirds of the employees owed money have yet to be paid.

Most Department of Labor wage theft cases do not end up in court, but the department sued at least seven of the employers on the list in order to compel them to pay, according to court records. That means the department went to great lengths to recover money for workers, but is left with the millions in payments waiting to be claimed.

» READ MORE: Philly-area home-care workers often get cheated on overtime. Pa.’s Medicaid rules don’t help.

The Department of Labor focuses its wage theft investigations on low-wage workers, and they tend to be transient, a department spokesperson said, which can make them harder to find.

Undocumented workers are also sometimes afraid to cash checks or interact with the government.

Most employers found to owe money to workers pay them directly after a federal investigation, a Department of Labor spokesperson said. But if a company says it hasn’t found the workers, it sends the back wages to the Department of Labor. In some cases, such as Successful Aging Care Net, employers send the pay to the Department of Labor and government employees are tasked with getting it to the wage-theft victims.

Employers send a worker’s “last known address” and the department also uses public databases, consulates, social media, and community stakeholders to find workers, the spokesperson said. “But it’s not foolproof,” he said. “This is a challenge that we have.”

In the case of Affectionate Home Health Care, which is based in Lansdowne, the Department of Labor ordered it to pay $2.3 million in back wages and damages to nearly 400 of its workers in January 2023. According to Labor Department data, just two of those workers got their money.

After The Inquirer turned up Latasha Kirton’s phone number, a reporter told her she was owed $51,000. She was stunned.

» READ MORE: A workers’ guide to wage theft: What to do if your boss steals your wages in Pa.

Kirton, 49, of Lansdowne, said her aunt had sent her an article about the investigation but she didn’t know that she was owed anything. She stopped working at the company before the pandemic. (Wage theft cases can take years to settle.)

The money would go a long way for her. She’s hoping to go back to school to become a phlebotomist and has credit card debt to pay.

Raheem Mosley’s sister, Shakara Mosley, also worked at Successful Aging Care Net and didn’t know she was owed money. A reporter gave her the news: $67,000.

“This is something I can invest in the future for my kids,” said the 30-year-old mother of two.

She had only just left the company, where she was working 16-hour days caring for her father. She was frustrated.

“If this money that is owed to us, why haven’t people reached out to us?” she said. “I just pray that we can get our money because we do deserve it.”