Kentucky court orders Asmussen to pay close to $500,000 in back pay, damages

A U.S. District Court has issued an order in a long-running Department of Labor case that would require Steve Asmussen to pay $243,000 in back wages to employees in his Kentucky operations plus an identical amount in damages.

The order by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky follows a remand from the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to consider damages in the case, which involves overtime pay for employees of Asmussen’s stable in Kentucky from 2012-2019, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Labor. Both the Department of Labor and Asmussen have filed multiple appeals in the case over the past several years.

Clark Brewster, the attorney for Asmussen, said on Tuesday that the decision by the Western District to award damages will be appealed, again to the Sixth Circuit.

“No court has ever said that this was willful,” Brewster said.

The case was brought following an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor’s wage and hour division, which said that Asmussen failed to provide proper overtime payments to 163 grooms and hotwalkers in Kentucky who worked more than 40 hours a week during the four-year period. The investigation also alleged that Asmussen’s stable “failed to keep accurate pay records” and violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by “knowingly modifying its records to make it appear the company paid employees by the hour.”

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Nearly a dozen trainers in recent years have been caught up in overtime investigations by state and federal labor departments, most notably in New York. Trainers have acknowledged that they have failed to adjust long-standing payment practices, like providing weekly pay to grooms and hotwalkers, to modern labor laws. Many have reached settlements in excess of hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle the cases while adopting better wage-management practices, like installing timeclocks.

Asmussen has been cited twice by labor regulators in the past several years. In 2021, the Department of Labor required Asmussen to pay $563,000 in back wages to employees of his New York operation for similar violations. Last year, he reached a settlement in August to pay $129,776 in back wages and $75,223 in penalties for violations of the H-2B visa program.

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