Restaurant owners Kong Ji Wang, Kong Sheng Wang and Ying Hui Wang were recently charged by a Houston, Texas, grand jury with two counts of bribing a public official and one count of conspiracy to bribe a public official. The indictment claims that the three individuals attempted to bribe the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour (WHD) Division investigator as an incentive to reduce the amount of back wages they were being ordered to pay.

The three defendants owned the Famous Cajun Grill and the Famous Wok Grill in Humble, Texas' Deerbook Mall, where they allegedly underpaid employees as the result of minimum wage and overtime violations. When WHD investigators visited the locations to enforce those Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) provisions, the restaurant owners supposedly offered cash sums of $3,000 and then $5,000 to reduce the amount of back wages they were told they owed for those violations - $39,143.

The FLSA requires that all employees receive at least the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and overtime pay at time-and-a-half their standard hourly rate if they work more than 40 hours in a single week. If they fail to do so, or don't have the payroll processing equipment necessary to demonstrate their compliance with those standards, they can be held subject to paying employees back wages and penalties. 

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