Long Island employers stole nearly $4 million from their workers last year. Nearly 40% came from home healthcare.

Patrick Atta didn’t know he was owed tens of thousands of dollars for his time as a live-in home health aide in Suffolk County, caring for a man with Parkinson’s disease, until years after he’d left the job.

The 41-year-old Ghanaian native said he’d forgo breakfast or wake in the middle of the night to tend to his client, who suffered from hallucinations, working roughly 91 hours a week without overtime. He earned about $1,600 each week from Patchogue-based Serene Home Nursing Agency — but is now expected to receive $35,000 in back pay and nearly $38,000 more in damages after the company and federal labor investigators recently reached a $6.4 million settlement for wage theft from nearly 500 aides.

"I thought maybe if I complained a lot they were going to fire me," Atta told Newsday. "I was afraid back then."

The home healthcare sector last year withheld more wages from employees than any other industry on Long Island, a Newsday analysis of state and federal labor investigations found. Nearly 40% of $3.9 million in wages deemed stolen by Nassau- and Suffolk-based employers came from home healthcare companies, ahead of the amounts attributed to restaurants and construction firms, records show.

An increasingly aging population and the desire to avoid costly nursing homes, both locally and statewide, is driving a boom in home healthcare that is requiring more aides — especially ones who may be vulnerable to wage theft, experts and worker advocates said.

"Home healthcare is one of those areas that’s still the Wild West," said Janice Fine, the director of the Workplace Justice Lab at Rutgers University, a worker research and advocacy center.

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Statewide, there are about 1,400 home healthcare agencies, and the industry employs more than 663,000 people, according to state and federal data, making it one of New York’s largest employment segments. Roughly 500 agencies are licensed to serve Long Island.

A combination of the workforce’s isolation, low wages, unique pay structure and its preponderance of women and immigrants lends itself to mistreatment, including wage theft, the experts and advocates said.

Home care aides in New York earned an average of $39,620 in 2025, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, making them among the health sector’s lowest paid workers.

In fact, 61% of them were on some form of public assistance in 2023, with almost a third on food and nutrition assistance such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, according to PHI, a research advocacy group that analyzes census data.

And a study released late last month by Northwell Health found that a quarter of home health aides are burned out from stress, experience racism on the job and have encountered workplace violence.

"These are workers who never see the other workers. It’s not like you have the break room in a nursing home and everyone can complain," said James McGregor, the research director of the healthcare union 1199SEIU, which also represents home health aides.

From 2017 to 2025, 66 Long Island home health agencies stole more than $11.6 million in wages from nearly 8,000 employees, according to state and federal records. The amount represents only concluded labor department investigations against employers, with amounts sometimes subject to change through appeal or settlement.

This data "likely understates the true scope," said Christopher Marlborough, a Lynbrook-based wage theft lawyer who serves as a board member of the state chapter of the National Employment Lawyers Association. The findings don’t take into account private lawsuits, settlements and "the vast majority of criminals who never get caught," Marlborough said.

One company, Hempstead-based Valucare Inc., owes more than $4 million in back wages to roughly 2,700 people, the most of any home health agency on Long Island, according to Newsday’s analysis. Valucare, which didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, didn’t have any penalties levied against it despite facing 13 investigations, records show, meaning all it currently owes is back pay.

"If all an employer has to do is provide back pay, then it's like the workers have provided a no-interest loan," said Fine, who argues that regulators are often woefully understaffed and don’t provide enough deterrent to repeat offenders. "And we know for low-income workers, that means groceries, rent, basic budget items in their own families have suffered."

‘Different than an intentional effort’

Home health aides on Long Island, New York City and Westchester earn $19.65 an hour plus 1.5 times their regular rate if they work more than 40 hours a week. Live-in aides are typically only paid for 13 hours of work a day, provided they get eight hours of rest — including at least five hours of uninterrupted sleep — and three hours for meals.

But whether someone had to work during their rest hours can be "grounds for a lot of disputes," with usually just the aide and a client able to verify claims, said Bill Hammond, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who focuses on healthcare issues.

For years, workers and advocacy groups have pushed to end the so-called 13-hour rule, arguing that aides routinely work through their down time. Some New York City officials are pushing a local measure that would ban 24-hour shifts, but it’s faced significant resistance from other Democratic lawmakers, who control the city and state government.

Industry officials, meanwhile, say that while some providers flout laws, others may inadvertently shortchange their employees because of Medicaid reimbursement rates that cover less than the services cost. They also say differing state and federal regulations cause confusion among providers.

"Aides who were underpaid should always be made whole, but incorrectly applying overtime rules is different than an intentional effort to shortchange workers," said Kevin Thomas, the head of the New York State Association of Health Care Providers, a trade group representing licensed home care companies.

William Van Slyke, a spokesperson for the Home Care Association of New York State, another industry trade group, said federal, state and local laws create a "tremendously complex and bewildering web of regulations at every level of government."

"Unfortunately, the term ‘wage theft’ very often unfairly ascribes villain status to an organization that in reality is making every effort to be both a good employer and compliant government partner."

Still awaiting back wages

In 2016, Katrina Kalish was a newly licensed nursing assistant who got a job as a home care aide for Levittown-based Pamper Our Parents. Then 24, the West Islip resident recalled working 60-hour weeks and earning just $720 to $900, before taxes.

Kalish worked with an elderly couple, one of whom had suffered a brain injury and needed a wheelchair, helping with dressing, bathing, cooking and cleaning. She was classified as an independent contractor, which typically allows workers to set their own wages and hours but excludes them from benefits such as health and retirement plans and overtime.

"I would just get paid straight time, and that always kind of bothered me," Kalish, now a nurse living in Canada, told Newsday in a phone interview.

Her boss refused to send Kalish her last paycheck after she left the job, she said, so she filed a complaint with the state Department of Labor’s Wage Theft Hotline. The state ultimately found that Pamper Our Parents owed Kalish and 13 other workers more than $71,000 in back wages.

Earlier this year, roughly a decade later, the state brought its case to Nassau County Supreme Court. A judge ruled in August that Pamper Our Parents was now required to pay the workers more than $220,000, including damages, penalties and interest.

Kalish said she still hasn't received any money.

The Department of Labor "told us that there wasn't really any way for them to force" repayment of back wages, Kalish said.

Dorothy Leonard, Pamper Our Parents’ CEO, didn’t respond to questions about the recent judgment or when Kalish and others would be paid. But she said in a statement that Pamper Our Parents "maintained a good-faith position regarding the classification of certain caregivers as independent contractors, although the Department of Labor ultimately reached a different determination."

Another home care firm, Massapequa-based Friends For Life, reached a $250,000 settlement in January with the U.S. Department of Labor, which said the company also misclassified workers as independent contractors to avoid paying overtime. The state is investigating the company, following Newsday’s inquiries last summer, for running an alleged unlicensed home healthcare company. The company denies wrongdoing.

Difficult to recoup wages

As Kalish’s case illustrates, collecting wages following an administrative order can prove tricky.

Of the $4.75 million state labor investigators ruled is due to Long Island home care aides, just a quarter has been paid, records show.

Federal investigators collect approximately 90% of owed back wages, a labor department spokesperson said in an email to Newsday. 

New York State lawmakers enacted a measure making wage theft a form of larceny — expanding it from labor law enforcement to criminal law. And last year, the state budget expanded the New York Department of Labor’s wage theft powers, allowing it to place liens on employers’ property, seize financial assets and issue stop-work orders after a judgment.

Last year, the state issued just two asset seizures, according to the New York Department of Labor, compared to the 135 it has carried out so far this year. The Department also issued 788 liens in 2025 and so far this year has issued 98, according to the state agency.

State Sen. Shelley Mayer (D-Yonkers), who sponsored a bill to allow the suspension or denial of business licenses to employers who commit wage theft, says more can be done.

"This is criminal, failure to pay wages or failure to pay benefits," said Mayer, whose stalled bill would also bar employers found to have committed wage theft from opening businesses under new names. "And it should be treated in a serious way, like a crime."

‘Worth it ... to skirt the law’

Newsday’s analysis found that a third of Long Island home healthcare companies have been cited for owing back wages by investigators on two or more occasions.

Pamper Our Parents, which employed Kalish, was subject to at least five state or federal Department of Labor actions between 2017 and 2025, totaling $90,499 in back wages.

Leonard, the CEO, said the company — which continues to operate — reached a settlement with the state and has complied with the terms. She declined to provide the agreement, citing confidentiality.

"One of the biggest reasons why companies violate the law is because they think that it's so unlikely that they're going to ever be caught," Fine, the Rutgers think tank director, told Newsday. "And even if they are caught, the back wages they are going to have to pay, or the penalties ... make it worth it for them to skirt the law."

Fine’s organization at Rutgers has also focused on low staffing at the state and federal labor departments as a hindrance to effective wage theft probes.

As of this August, the division within the U.S. Department of Labor, whose mission it is to ensure labor laws are being followed, had 590 investigators nationwide, the Department of Labor spokesperson told Newsday. This is more than a 50-year low, according to the Workplace Justice Lab at Rutgers and Northwestern universities.

"It means that the people who are in these jobs are completely overwhelmed," Fine said.

Federal labor officials told Congress in a budget document that its staffing levels have "negatively impacted mission-critical activities" and are "not sufficient to truly serve the needs of the nation’s growing workforce."

The department told Newsday limited resources require them to be strategic about which cases they pursue, prioritizing investigations where they can have the greatest impact.

The state Department of Labor did not answer questions about its staffing levels, but at a budgetary hearing held by state lawmakers in February, legislators pointed out that there were about half as many investigators as there were in the 1960s.

Atta said he wasn’t aware that he could complain to get his back wages. After years of litigation, he’s hoping the money will arrive soon. He is now studying to become a licensed practical nurse and plans to use it to pay for school and some bills.

"You need to have someone to fight for us," he said. "The job is tough and then we have nobody to fight for us."