Silicon Valley financial software giant Intuit to pay back $555,000 to 2,600 workers over missed overtime payments

• Intuit is paying more than $555,000 in back wages to workers who missed overtime payments.
• The Labor Department said it hadn't kept accurate pay records and didn't pay workers for required training.

Intuit, a Silicon Valley company that provides financial software for employers, is paying back more than half a million dollars to thousands of its own workers after failing to pay them for some required training.

The announcement came just a week before the company announced it was laying off 10% of its workforce.

The US Department of Labor said in early July that an investigation by its Wage and Hour Division had found that about 2,600 US employees had collectively missed more than $555,000 in overtime pay because Intuit hadn't kept accurate pay records and hadn't paid workers for some time spent on required training.

As a result, Intuit failed to pay these workers the correct amount of overtime pay — which is one-and-a-half times normal wages for hours worked over 40 in a workweek — which violated the Fair Labor Standards Act, the DOL said.

A group of 2,610 workers — all based in the US — is getting between $76 and $694 each in back pay, with an average of about $200, a DOL spokesperson told Business Insider. Based on its employee count of about 18,000 before the layoffs, this makes up nearly 15% of its global workforce.

The case, which was settled administratively, covered the period from September 2021 to July 2023, the DOL spokesperson said.

"All current and former employees who took QuickBooks ProAdvisor certification between September 2021 and August 2023 were notified that they would be compensated for the time they spent completing the course and they have now all been compensated," an Intuit spokesperson told BI.

Separately, Intuit announced Wednesday that it was laying off 1,800 employees, or about 10% of its workforce, including 1,050 who it said weren't meeting performance expectations. Its CEO said that this wasn't down to cost-cutting measures, noting that Intuit planned to hire about 1,800 more workers.

Intuit also said that it would be closing two offices: one in Boise and another in the Canadian city of Edmonton.

Intuit's products include TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp. It claims to have about 100 million customers globally.

Correction: July 12, 2024 — This article previously misstated the number of customers Intuit claims to have worldwide. It is 100 million, not 100,000.