It's quite aggravating that the DoL can only fine them $3500. I think that at the very least there ought to be punitive as well as economic damages in cases of blatant abuse like this. The problem with our politics is that as soon as someone proposes putting muscular penalties in place for egregious misbehavior some lobbyist or PR flack will pop up with a story like 'Joe Schmoe made a simple math error in distributing tip income among his restaurant staff...under a proposed new law, he could face ruin and even jail time at the hands of heartless government bureaucrats.'<p><i>Beverly Rubin, vice president of HR Shared Services with Electronics for Imaging [said:] "During this process we unintentionally overlooked laws that require even foreign employees to be paid based on local U.S. standards."</i><p>That's a bit like your VP of accounting expressing surprise at discovering a requirement to file annual tax returns.<p><i>The company said it cooperated fully with the U.S. Labor Department once it became aware of the problem, and paid the back wages of the employees.</i><p>And why wouldn't they when the costs of noncompliance are so low? Despite being caught, they still only paid CA minimum wage of $8/hour to make up the difference - good luck finding anyone competent to install computers at that price on the open market.<p>Hopefully the firm will be held to account for immigration fraud as well as labor violations, because there is no way they applied for work visas for these employees - doing so requires making declarations about wage/salary equivalence. Most likely they told their Indian employees to apply for tourist visas and say they were staying with relatives.