BOLI's Budget Grew 161%. One Wage Claim Waited 1,046 Days.

For over 120 years, the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) has enforced the state's wage, overtime, and civil-rights laws.▸ A performance audit from the Oregon Secretary of State's Audits Division⧉ -- which BOLI itself requested in 2023 -- found the agency's legislatively adopted budget grew from $31,332,768 in the 2019-21 biennium to $81,627,488 in 2025-27, a 161 percent increase. Over the same six years, backlogs built up in every division. As of December 2024, the longest wait on BOLI's Wage and Hour pending-investigator list was 1,046 days -- not to resolve a claim, but just to get it assigned to an investigator.

BOLI is led by an elected Labor Commissioner and split into five areas: Program Support and the Commissioner's Office, Civil Rights, Wage and Hour, Apprenticeship and Training, and Employer Assistance.▸ Its 2023-25 budget funded 157 positions. In a 2024 report, BOLI itself had already told the public its ability to enforce worker protections was in peril; the Wage and Hour and Civil Rights divisions were struggling with excessive backlogs, and the Apprenticeship and Training Division had paused federally required compliance reviews of nearly all apprenticeship programs since some point during the pandemic -- a decision auditors could find no internal documentation for at all.

BOLI's budget rose across all three of the most recent biennia -- from $37,846,477 (2021-23) to $53,637,599 (2023-25) to $81,627,488 in the current 2025-27 cycle, which includes the 2025 legislative session's decision to fund 46 new permanent positions, BOLI's largest staffing addition on record.▸ Yet by late summer 2025, every division was still carrying a backlog the new hires had not yet had time to touch: 2,500 Wage and Hour claims awaiting staff review and another 2,084 awaiting investigation (Aug. 6), 3,277 Civil Rights intake forms pending review (Aug. 1), 290 incomplete apprenticeship compliance-review standards (Sept. 10), and over 122 unassigned case files in the Administrative Prosecution Unit, where "most new cases are being put on a waitlist" (July 31).

The Wage and Hour Division's own numbers show how deep the queue runs.▸ As of December 5, 2024, 2,022 claims and complaints were waiting to be assigned to an investigator; 76 of them had already waited over a year and a half, and the single longest wait was 1,046 days -- nearly three years. By February 5, 2025, that assignment queue had grown to 1,890 claims. Auditors calculated that with 10 Wage and Hour investigators working at BOLI's own expected rate of 85 investigations per person per year, clearing that queue alone -- assuming no new claims arrived and no staff were added -- would take over two years.

BOLI tried to buy time by rationing service.▸ From October 31, 2024 to October 1, 2025, the division simply stopped investigating new wage claims from anyone earning above $25.34 an hour, or $52,710 a year -- a threshold auditors noted doesn't account for family size or seasonal work, and excludes trades like electricians, roofers, and sheet-metal workers even as it still covers most food-service, hospitality, home-care, and farm workers. The triage shows up in the caseload: between August 12, 2024 and February 5, 2025, the intake backlog fell by 2,303 (to 3,257, some of it claims now excluded by the threshold), but the investigations backlog -- the queue behind intake -- grew by 609. Work was being pushed downstream, not resolved. Once a case does clear investigation and heads to a hearing, the wait can lengthen again: most final orders issued between 2014 and 2019 took under eight months from hearing to final order, but from 2020 to 2023, 15 of 22 cases (68 percent) took over a year. BOLI's Commissioner said that when she joined the agency in 2023, cases were taking around five years to reach a final order at all.

The audit's staffing table shows why hiring alone hasn't closed the gap: BOLI's turnover rate hit double digits in six of the seven years from 2018 to 2024, even as its authorized position count grew from 80 to 135.▸ Turnover was worst in leadership -- 29 executive and management staff left in that span, and the Civil Rights Division alone cycled through four different administrators while Wage and Hour and Apprenticeship and Training each had three, with months-long leadership gaps in between. BOLI's own human-resources function ran with frequent turnover and, for stretches between 2020 and mid-2024, a single person managing all HR duties for the whole agency. Auditors interviewed over 50 current and former BOLI employees and found "the overwhelming sentiment was frustration and stress"; one Wage and Hour lead worker reported carrying 60 active cases at once, exceeding the division's own 50-case threshold.

Beyond the 46 new positions, the 2025 legislature also funded a reclassification of 34 existing positions for pay-equity reasons, and BOLI received an additional $2.16 million to build a case management system to replace a database staff say is too slow to track workflow or generate basic reports.▸ But auditors were blunt that "money alone will not fix BOLI's problems": the agency still lacks a written strategic plan, has policies and procedures that in some cases date to 2003, and has never documented a transition plan for an incoming Commissioner -- risks that predate, and don't disappear with, this year's budget increase. BOLI agreed with all ten of the audit's recommendations, with implementation target dates running from mid-2026 through December 2027.