Wage and Hour Division Compliance Strategies Evaluation

These standards include the minimum wage, overtime, and child labor provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Data, research, and evaluation inform WHD’s compliance strategies and help the agency use its resources to monitor and assess whether it is applying its strategies effectively and efficiently.

As part of this effort, DOL’s Chief Evaluation Office contracted with Mathematica to support WHD with an evaluation of compliance strategies. Through this project, we investigated effective ways to assess compliance strategies and compliance assistance within WHD. Key deliverables included reports on the following topics: a review of compliance literature and relevant databases, using external data to enhance monitoring and evaluation of compliance strategies, directions for future research, and design options for compliance assistance interventions that are informed by behavioral science.

Knowledge development activities provided the foundation for the study. We met with WHD staff and reviewed WHD documents and databases to learn about the agency’s internal planning, targeting, and investigation processes. We also conducted comprehensive reviews of external literature and databases. This work aims to identify promising compliance strategies and compliance assistance strategies for evaluation.

Based on knowledge gaps identified through the literature and database review, as well as discussions with WHD and a panel of experts about compliance strategies, we developed a framework for WHD and other agencies to consider when designing processes for monitoring and evaluation strategies and outcomes. To supplement that work, we explored whether and how data that are housed outside of WHD could be integrated with WHD’s administrative data, and the limitations of doing so.

Finally, we developed options for evaluations to test cost-effective compliance assistance strategies. These strategies were informed by behavioral science and could help us gauge increases in employers’ voluntary compliance. We worked with WHD to identify areas that would benefit from improved program performance and developed a logic model with three components: (1) a process map describing the procedures to be modified by intervention options, (2) a behavioral map that shows behavioral bottlenecks and potential interventions to overcome them, and (3) intermediate and final outcome measures that serve to track employer behaviors. We proposed options for compliance assistance interventions and designs for testing them based on research findings from the field, behavioral theory, lessons learned in other behavioral intervention research, and findings from earlier study tasks.