A former employee of D.C.’s Office of Employment Services is suing the city agency for allegedly failing to pay him for overtime hours he worked during the pandemic.

The lawsuit filed on behalf of Andre Chisolm, a resident of Charles County, Maryland, accuses the department of violating the same wage and hour laws it enforces on private employers on behalf of the District. Chisolm is seeking more than $73,000 in unpaid wages and damages, plus attorney’s fees and court costs.

The suit was filed Monday in D.C. Superior Court by attorney Justin Zelikovitz with the DC Wage Law firm. A spokesperson for the Department of Employment Services did not return a request for comment. Washington City Paper first reported on the lawsuit.

The agency has attracted criticism for its handling of unemployment benefits during the pandemic, with many claimants saying the department kept them in limbo for months with delayed payments or little to no communication about the status of their claims. Reporting from DCist/WAMU also showed the agency failed to prevent many instances of identity theft in which bad actors used the unemployment system to file fraudulent claims — sometimes successfully — on unwitting residents’ behalf.

In the suit, Chisolm says he worked as an unemployment claims processor for DOES from roughly July 2007 until July 2o21, earning $40.84 hourly during his final two years. When the pandemic hit and the office was deluged by thousands of new claims, he says he often worked more than 40 hours a week, logging around 857 hours of overtime in 2020 and 2021. But the agency failed to pay him overtime — worth one and a half times his regular hourly rate — for all the extra hours he worked, according to the suit.

“In this failure, DOES not only betrayed its own mandate, but also failed the thousands of unemployed D.C. workers whose unemployment insurance claims have not been processed on a timely basis,” the lawsuit says.

Chisolm says DOES paid him back wages for about 65 hours of overtime in October, several months after he stopped working there. But as of this week, D.C. still has not paid him for the remaining 792 hours of overtime, the suit says.

The Office of Wage-Hour Education and Enforcement, a division within D.C.’s Office of Employment Services, is responsible for enforcing D.C.’s wage laws, including its overtime statute. With limited exceptions, D.C. Code requires employers to pay hourly workers at least 1 and a half times their regular wage for any hours they work in excess of 40 per week.