A community of 30,000 US Transcriptionist serving Medical Transcription Industry
If you work on Veterans Administration (VA) accounts, you MUST be classified as an employee and earn the appropriate wage determination rate (in the neighborhood of $14 to $20-plus an hour depending on county). In addition, you must have a separate hourly rate of pay that is applied towards a benefits package.
If you are doing this kind of work and are not properly classified or you are not being paid what you're supposed to be paid, REPORT YOUR MTSO TO THE DEPARTMENT OF LABOR. Please do not contact the VA because it seems there is a nudge-wink going on between the VA and some of the MTSOs who have contracts with them. You can file an anonymous claim with the DOL to get any back-pay. The DOL will often audit the company, and depending on the scope of the audit, your coworkers may also get back-pay if it's due.
It's important to understand that silence enables this sleazy practice to go on unchecked and unremedied. There is no reason not to speak up for ourselves. Why would you want to sit back and let your company steal from you???
“You are assuming that work is being offshored and that the VA somehow knows all about this and has agreed to keep quiet about it. Those assumptions are not necessarily valid.”
Yes, for the purposes of recovering wages, which was the subject of my original post, my assumption that it is not a good idea to appeal to the VA is quite valid. Besides the fact that the DOL is the proper authority to address the issue of wages due, the VA doesn’t have a financial incentive to make sure its contractors are paying their employees properly.
“No, you are not making a legal case, but you have a better chance of someone paying attention to your complaint if it makes sense.”
The people to whom I was addressing the issue are MTs on this board who may be interested in filing a complaint for back-wages. No one else has suggested that what I repeated about Grandy's dealings with the VA did not make sense.
Again, if I were an employee working on VA contracts and not being paid properly, my complaint would be addressed to the DOL. In my experience, the DOL does pay attention to such complaints. What does not make sense to you about being paid the wrong wage for VA work instead of the correct wage and, therefore, filing a complaint? The DOL must think such complaints make sense since they have responded appropriately to such complaints in the past.
I never said I was filing a complaint about iMedX offshoring. That should be done by someone who has more detailed information about it than I have. I, having detailed information about another MTSO that I believe is illegally offshoring, have complained to the proper authorities about it and continue to follow up.
If one was going to file a complaint regarding suspicions of offshoring by iMedX, that would be addressed to another authority. My original post was about pay, and the offshore issue was only tangentially addressed, so I’m unclear why you seem especially sensitive about it. Given the account related by Grandy and MTs who are/were employed by Alpha of a sudden drop in workload immediately following iMedX’s acquisition of Alpha and subsequent laying-off of some of Alpha’s MTs who were transcribing VA work; the fact that iMedX employs a large number of MTs in India; the fact that offshoring is rampant in the MT industry because it is so lucrative; the fact that VHA directive 2008-042 that contained the provision that medical transcription work had to be physically performed in the US also stipulated that the directive would expire on August 31, 2013; the fact that I personally have knowledge of another MTSO that is very likely offshoring in violation of its contract with a state government; the fact that, despite a mountain of evidence supporting my allegation, government agencies to date have conducted the most inept investigations into the matter, repeatedly ignoring the very documentation that would either prove or disprove the allegation; and the fact that the VA has an incentive to NOT address offshoring because a contractor with the intent to offshore can submit a substantially lower bid than other MTSOs who plan to pay their employees the correct wage, and the VA seeks to “attain the most favorable pricing possible,” yes—my assumptions make perfect sense to anyone who looks at all the facts together and uses their common sense.
“Directives are valid until they are replaced. That one is still in force because it has not been replaced.”
Where is that documented? I do know that the referenced VHA directive specifically states that it will expire on August 31, 2013. Your claim that it is valid until it is replaced contradicts what the directive says, so it does not make sense unless you can provide a source that substantiates it. Please share.
Your MTSO has stolen money from you by not paying you what you were supposed to be paid according to the law. There may be a statute of limitations on how far back you can go (maybe 2 years?), but put in for as much as you think you are owed and let the Department of Labor take care of the rest of it.
You can find out what the hourly rates are by using the link below and going to the government's Wage Determinations OnLine website.
You also might want to read up on the McNamara-O'Hara Service Contract Act. Know your rights and exercise them!!!