VIDEO: Business Owner Must Pay $39K After Paying Former Employee with 91K Oily Pennies

A decision has been handed down in a case regarding a Georgia man who received his final paycheck in 91,500 pennies in January 2021.

Fayetteville resident Andreas Flaten was given the mountain of pennies as his last paycheck by the owner of a Peachtree City auto repair shop, A OK Walker Autoworks, Fox 5 reported Friday.

Video footage from March 2021 shows the former employee standing next to a wheelbarrow full of the oil-covered pennies he found on his driveway:

“This is my final paycheck. $915 in pennies,” he said at the time.

According to the recent Fox report, Flaten notified the Department of Labor after Miles Walker refused to provide his last paycheck.

“The Wage and Hour Division contacted Walker. The shop owner then dumped the thousands of pennies in the employee’s driveway along with a pay stub marked with an expletive and published defamatory statement about the former employee on the company’s website,” the article said.

In January 2022, Atlanta News First reported that since the penny incident, Walker had been arrested multiple times and faced charges of stalking:

The Department of Labor announced a lawsuit against Walker in early 2022, and it was later determined “Walker violated the FLSA’s overtime provisions by paying the complainant and other employees straight-time rates for all hours worked, including for hours over 40 in a workweek when an overtime rate-of-pay was legally required,” according to the Fox report.

Now, Walker must pay several former workers over $39,000 in back wages and damages. He is also not allowed to discriminate or retaliate against any of his employees.

The man is further forbidden from violating federal minimum wage and overtime provisions.

In April 2021, Flaten was unsure what to do with the pennies, but Coinstar arrived at his home to gather up the coins and take them to be cleaned, counted, wrapped, and recirculated, per Inside Edition:

In exchange, Flaten received several one hundred dollar bills, saying, “I’m just happy I don’t have to go through and actually wash the pennies myself.”