CONCORD — Nearly a year after Vicki Favreau filed a complaint with New Hampshire state labor officials alleging her employer was cheating her out of pay, she received some good news.

An investigator from the U.S. Department of Labor called Favreau in May to inform her that the investigation into Favreau’s complaint had been completed and that she shortly would be receiving a letter confirming that a check for more than $43,000 — an amount nearly matching her annual income — a was headed her way.

Two weeks ago, the check arrived.

“I was blown away,” Favreau said. “I never imagined it would be that much.”

Favreau was just one of 36 employees of West Lebanon-based Your Comfort Zone, a provider of in-home care workers, eligible to share in $1 million the U.S. Department of Labor collected in back wages and damages along with a $36,000 fine for willful wage theft stemming from Your Comfort Zone’s denying employees overtime pay.

“Your Comfort Zone’s repeated shortchanging of its employees is egregious and illegal and deprives people who provide valuable and necessary care in our communities of the hard-earned overtime wages they need to support themselves and their families,” Wage and Hour Division District Director Steven McKinney in Manchester said in a statement, adding that employers will be held to account when they “repeatedly or willfully (violate) the rights of workers to be paid their full wages.”

Last year the Valley News interviewed former employees of Your Comfort Zone who detailed how the business and its owner, Rosalind Godfrey, in numerous instances refused to pay overtime rates for their work and pressured employees to return wages that she was forced to pay after being previously investigated for violating wage laws.

Neither Godfrey nor her attorneys responded to multiple requests for comment.

Investigators with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division found that between April 2020 and August 2022, Your Comfort Zone paid home care workers at “straight-time” rates — that is non-overtime scale — for the hours they worked in excess of 40 hours per week, the news release said.

Godfrey told employees that she was not required to pay them an hourly overtime rate while they were sleeping, even though employees staying around the clock for days a time at clients’ homes routinely have to wake at all hours of the night to assist their client in going to the bathroom or with other needs.

Tuesday’s announcement marks the third time in five years that Your Comfort Zone and Godfrey have been cited for violating labor wage laws and had to pay workers money owed to them, according to the Labor Department.

Following two separate investigations in 2018, regulators recovered a total of $100,055 in overtime wages owed to 25 employees. Subsequently, government investigators learned Godfrey alleged to have “coerced some affected workers into kicking back the money,” the Labor Department said.

As reported by the Valley News in December, Godfrey pressured employees to return those wages after the investigation and some employees said they complied just so Godfrey would stop harassing them.

Cheyenne Wrigley, of Woodsville, said she recently received a check of $14,000 in recovered wages and damages from her time employed with Your Comfort Zone. Wrigley said she “quit on the spot” when she found out that Godfrey had been “changing my whole time sheet up” and “forging my signature.”

Godfrey’s actions in regard to Wrigley were detailed in a civil lawsuit the U.S. Department of Labor brought against the business and Godfrey in federal court last year.

In September 2021, Godfrey submitted to a Labor Department investigator a time sheet purporting to show the hours worked by Wrigley, a caregiver, during a preceding August pay period, the lawsuit stated.

But “neither the writing in the column reflecting Wrigley’s work start and end times nor the signature of the time sheet match(ed) Wrigley’s handwriting. The hours included on the purported time sheet did not align with Wrigley’s actual hours worked during the pay period or the time sheet that Wrigley had filled out and submitted to Godfrey,” according to the government’s complaint.

When Wrigley cooperated with investigators, Godfrey “took actions to intimidate” Wrigley by “following” her to another work site after she had served notice her resignation from Your Comfort Zone, according to the lawsuit.

On Tuesday, Wrigley said the confrontation with Godfrey occurred when she was exiting a client’s home at Quail Hollow retirement community in Hanover, and she had to phone for the assistance of another co-worker to safely escort her to her car.

Last week in federal court in Concord, the court entered a consent judgment against Godfrey. That order, which stems from the Labor Department civil lawsuit, requires Godfrey to pay $50,000 in additional punitive damages to certain employees and permanently prohibits her from violating the Fair Labor Standards Act anti-retaliation requirements. The order enjoins her from retaliating, seeking kickbacks and taking or threatening any adverse action against any current or former employees who seek to assert their rights.

Favreau, now manager of a convenience store in St. Johnsbury, Vt., said this week that she plans to use $7,000 of her recovered overtime pay to pay for the tuition of her middle granddaughter to attend school to become a licensed barber and then “my youngest granddaughter when she gets ready” for her post-high school education.

Wrigley, 29, who now works for Caring Hands Home Health And Hospice Care in Monroe, N.H., said the recovered overtime pay came in handy for her, too.

“I have two kids, so I have bills,” she said. “So I was able to pay off all my bills.”

Favreau said the recovered overtime pay was welcomed but the knowledge her complaint helped 35 other employees of Your Comfort Zone finally to receive the pay they were entitled to is especially gratifying.

Initially, when she filed her complaint against Your Comfort Zone, Favreau said she “didn’t do it for the money. I just wanted (the state Labor Department) to be aware what (Godfrey) was doing and if it was legal for her not to pay us overtime.”

But, Favreau acknowledged on Tuesday, “that complaint turned out good for a bunch of us who worked for her.”

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.