What Happened
On October 1, 2025, the California Labor Commissioner’s Office issued citations against Hart Placement Agency, Inc. and its owners Annie and Hartmann Ghaw, assessing $4,423,450 in unpaid wages and penalties — $4,266,450 of which is owed directly to 144 affected caregivers. The Commissioner found that the agency had misclassified those workers as independent contractors when, under California’s ABC test for worker classification, they were employees. The defendants have administratively appealed; a hearing date before a Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE) hearing officer was pending as of public reporting in April–May 2026.
Context
According to the Labor Commissioner’s account of the investigation, Hart Placement directed its caregivers to obtain individual business licenses and to file fictitious-business-name statements — paperwork that would, on its face, support a contractor-style relationship — while in practice the agency retained control over schedules, duties, and compensation, the hallmarks of an employer-employee relationship under the ABC test codified in California Labor Code section 2775. The Commissioner’s office further found that caregivers were instructed to falsify timesheets to conceal shifts exceeding twelve or twenty-four hours, masking what would otherwise have been overtime exposure and triggering additional violations for failure to provide accurate itemized wage statements and the paid-sick-leave notices required under California law.
The investigation began in December 2024 after a referral from the Pilipino Workers Center of Southern California, a community organization that has been active in identifying and reporting wage-and-hour abuses in the in-home caregiving sector. Caregivers in private-home settings have been a recurring focus of California misclassification enforcement since Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court (2018) 4 Cal.5th 903 and the subsequent codification of the ABC test in AB 5 (2019); the home-care referral-agency exemption at Labor Code section 2783(e) is narrowly drawn and turns on facts that are typically disputed.
Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower, announcing the action, emphasized the nature of the work at stake: caregivers, she observed, do essential and physically demanding labor in clients’ homes — bathing, dressing, cleaning, and tending to people who cannot care for themselves — and the wage and classification protections of California law exist precisely so that work of that kind cannot be repackaged into a lower-cost contractor relationship by paperwork.
What’s Next
- DLSE administrative hearing. The Ghaws’ appeal will be heard by a hearing officer within DLSE. The hearing officer reviews the citation on the merits and may affirm, modify, or set aside.
- Superior court writ review. Either side may challenge the hearing officer’s decision by writ of mandate in the superior court of the county where the cited employer is located — here, Los Angeles County — under Labor Code section 1742 and Code of Civil Procedure section 1094.5. Posting a bond is required for an employer-petitioner.
- Collection track. Citation amounts ultimately upheld become enforceable as a judgment, and the Commissioner has broad collection tools including levies and recording liens against the cited parties and any successor entities.
- Industry signal. The size of the citation and the explicit findings about the “get a business license and a fictitious business name” structure make this a likely reference case in future enforcement actions against home-care referral agencies and small staffing operations using similar paperwork-driven contractor arrangements.
Notes
This is an administrative enforcement matter, not court litigation. No judicial opinion has issued. All facts are drawn from the Labor Commissioner’s publicly reported account of the citation and from independent press coverage cross-checked across multiple outlets. The defendants’ appeal has not yet been decided, and the findings recited above are the Commissioner’s findings — they remain subject to challenge at the administrative hearing and, if upheld, on writ review. Citation/case numbers assigned by DLSE were not included in the press coverage and could not be independently verified for this post.