Confirming earlier reports, New York employers will not have to distribute New York State Wage Theft Act Annual Pay Notices in January 2015 or thereafter.

Governor Cuomo has now signed a bill repealing the annual pay notice requirement.  As we reported earlier, the legislature is set to pass a bill in the coming days to make the repeal effective immediatelyrather than in 60 days, so that employers will not have to worry about distributing notices next month.  And now the NYS Department of Labor has chimed in releasing a notice on its website confirming that it will not require distribution of these pay notices in light of these recent developments.

At the same time, employers must still provide pay notices to new hires and otherwise comply with the rest of the Wage Theft Act’s requirements.  And the bill that repealed the annual notice requirement also provided additional protections to employees through further amendments to the Wage Theft Act.  We identified those amendments in a previous post, including amendments that increased potential damage awards, made it more difficult for employers to change their ownership structures to avoid wage theft violation liability, and placed the ten largest owners of a NY LLC on the hook for the LLC’s wage theft law violations.  Employers should familiarize themselves with these new amendments to ensure that they remain in compliance.