1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act . 2. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) Wage theft occurs when an employer does not pay an employee for work that the employee has performed, depriving the worker of wages and earnings to which the worker is legally entitled. This theft occurs in many forms, including by employers violating minimum wage requirements, failing to pay overtime compensation, requiring off-the-clock work, failing to provide final payments, misclassifying employees as being exempt from overtime compensation or as independent contractors rather than as employees, and improperly withholding tips. (2) Wage theft poses a serious and growing problem across industries for working individuals of the United States. Wage theft is widespread and is estimated to cost workers more than $15,000,000,000 per year. In certain industries, compliance with Federal wage and hour laws is less than 50 percent. (3) Wage theft is closely associated with employment discrimination, with women, immigrants, and minorities being disproportionately affected. Women are significantly more likely to experience minimum wage violations than men, foreign-born workers are nearly 2 times as likely to experience minimum wage violations as their counterparts born in the United States, and African-Americans are 3 times more likely to experience minimum wage violations than their White counterparts. (4) Wage theft is closely associated with unsafe working conditions. (5) Wage theft— (A) depresses the wages of working families who are already struggling to make ends meet; (B) strains social services funds; (C) diminishes consumer spending power and hurts local economies; (D) reduces vital State and Federal tax revenues; (E) places law-abiding employers at a competitive disadvantage with noncompliant employers; (F) burdens commerce and the free flow of goods