Legal Disclaimer

No legal advice

The decoder, state pages, federal page, and tool pages on this site cite statutes, regulations, and state DOL guidance — but a citation is not advice. Whether a particular rule applies to your situation depends on facts a lawyer needs to gather and evaluate. Statutes are amended; courts re-interpret. Our last-verified date on each page tells you how recently we re-checked the cite.

No attorney-client relationship

Using this site, emailing us a question, or clicking a lawyer-match link does not create an attorney-client relationship between you and WageTheftMap, Desymphony EOOD, or any referral partner. An attorney-client relationship requires a signed engagement letter with a licensed attorney.

"Wage theft" framing

Where this site uses the phrase "wage theft," it refers conditionally to potential statutory violations under federal or state wage-and-hour law (FLSA, state wage-payment-and-collection acts) — never as an assertion of fact about a named employer. Some state-bar advertising rules disallow language that asserts facts about an employer's conduct that have not been adjudicated; our editorial discipline is to use the term only conditionally.

Lawyer-match disclosures

Lawyer-match links on this site may direct to third-party referral partners that compensate us when a qualified lead is delivered. These partners are subject to state-bar advertising rules in your jurisdiction, which may include disclosure requirements (no "our team of attorneys" framing where the partner is a referral network rather than an employed-attorney roster). Federal and state government links on the site are not affiliate links — those are unconditional recommendations as the standard first-step filing path.

Reviewer status

We are retaining a US-licensed employment-law attorney to review every state page before it leaves the dev preview. That review has not yet happened: legal review is currently pending. Until reviewer signoff is complete, state pages display a verification pending badge and the reviewer block reads "Reviewer credential verification in progress." Treat the statute citations as informational, not legal advice. We never display a fabricated reviewer in production HTML.

Penalty estimates are estimates

The Final-Paycheck Decoder produces a maximum waiting-time-penalty estimate based on the statutory cap and your inputs. The actual penalty depends on (a) how many days the wages remain unpaid, (b) whether a court accepts the willful-failure standard, (c) employer counterarguments, and (d) any settlement negotiation. The decoder is not a guarantee of recovery.

Jurisdiction

The site is part of the Desymphony portfolio, with informational content directed at workers in the United States. By using the site, you acknowledge that WageTheftMap is not licensed to practice law in any US jurisdiction and does not do so. Operating-entity disclosure on /terms.