Advo speaks on the US Department of Labor’s recovery of $52,000 in wages owed to workers

AMARILLO, Texas (KAMR/KCIT) — The US Department of Labor said more than $52,000 in back wages that were owed to workers with disabilities from Advo Companies Inc. were recovered for 134 workers violating federal law.

The DOL reported on April 30 that Advo paid employees with disabilities an incorrect subminimum wage based on flawed time studies and incorrect prevailing wage rates.

The President and CEO of Advo Companies, Carla Hughes, sat down with MyHighPlains.com to discuss the wages that were recovered by the US Department of Labor.

Hughes said the back wages stem from a 2023 Department of Labor Recertification for Advo’s 14(c) License. The audit resulted in back wages that needed to be paid back to its employees.

“This happened because we do time studies, and those time studies allow us to break our jobs down into pieces, so that an individual who has more severe disabilities can participate in a job learning setting,” said Hughes.

Hughes said time studies are used to determine what its employees are paid who participate in a job. Advo breaks down jobs into parts allowing people with different levels of disability to participate in jobs to earn a wage using the time study with a prevailing wage.

“Doing those pieces, you do a time study with a prevailing wage and that means you call around to different businesses and get what their current wage is. We don’t utilize a minimum wage to do that wage because we want them to be able to earn what everyone else is making in the community,” she said.

Hughes said when the DOL did its time study, it used Advo’s 2022 time study which resulted in a more than 10% discrepancy based on the time study done by Advo parallel to the DOL which resulted in the underpayment of its employees.

“We’ve had our 14(c) License throughout those years we’ve had our recertification of our 14(c) and we had discrepancies. Unfortunately 2022 was our largest discrepancy that we ever had. I equate that to Covid, changes in prevailing wages,” Hughes said.

When asked if Advo’s plans to do anything moving forward, Hughes said Advo’s procedures have been working.

“With Covid and with other things it just was a snowball. We’re not really changing our procedures because those procedures have been working for 33 years,” said Hughes. “I think maybe one thing we are doing is probably looking more conscientiously at how fast the wages are rising in our community and nationally.”

Hughes said they paid the money back quickly once they learned about it.

Advo has been around for 33 years and takes care of adults with intellectual disabilities. Advo is a nonprofit organization that operates a pre-vocational training center, an adult day habilitation center, and 28 group homes.

Hughes said Advo works to give these individuals a full life.

“They are such a resilient group of individuals who have a desire to continue to learn and to grow. And our desire is to provide them with a purpose-filled life,” said Hughes. “We have a layer of things in our life. We have our family, we have our home, we have our community, we have our church, we have our friends, we have our activities, we have our work, we have all of those things.”

She said Advo provides that same sense of community and purpose to the people in their program.

“Unfortunately for the individuals that we serve, when they get out of high school, most of those things are gone,” she said. “And we really want to try and keep that for them. And that’s what this program does for them.”

Hughes said they still do the same good work they have always done.

“Our job is to continue to be here and to make sure that we’re providing what our individuals need to be successful in the community,” she said. “And we’re committed to that.”

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