Halliburton is set to pay back $18.3million to more than 1,000 oil and gas workers after they were improperly exempted from overtime pay.
The US Department of Labour said the oil company had improperly identified workers in 28 job categories as exempt from additional earnings under the Fair Labour Standards Act.
Halliburton has already begun the process of paying back the accrued overtime for one of the largest settlements for the Labour Department in recent years.
Almost a year ago, Halliburton agreed to buy Baker Hughes in a $34.6billion deal.
Employees are entitled to mandatory overtime pay only if they earn less than $455 weekly or have few or no management duties.
It was found by the Labour Department that Halliburton had automatically exempted all salaried workers from overtime without considering their income or duties.
Betty Campbell, a Labor Department official, said: “Ignorance is never an excuse for violating the law.”
A Halliburton spokeswoman said the company independently discovered that workers had been misclassified during an internal audit and began paying workers overtime as required by the law.
She said: “Throughout this process, Halliburton has worked earnestly and cooperatively with the US Department of Labor to equitably resolve this situation.”
The company will pay $18.3 million to 1,016 employees.
Halliburton has 70,000 employees in more than 80 countries.
The Halliburton investigation was part of a larger ongoing probe into the oil and gas industry’s pay practices, particularly in US states in the Southwest and Northeast.
In December, the Labour Department announced that a number of companies involved in natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, including Chesapeake Energy and Citrus Energy, would collectively pay $4.5 million to more than 5,300 workers who were improperly exempted from overtime pay.