A Kansas House representative and Republican candidate for secretary of state said it wasn’t his fault that employees in his restaurants were not paid minimum wage or overtime pay.

District 41 Rep. Pat Proctor is running for the Kansas secretary of state seat after incumbent Scott Schwab chose to leave the post in a failed attempt to run for governor. Proctor faces Democratic nominee Jennifer Day, of Lawrence and Scott Morgan, also of Lawrence, representing the Unite Kansas Party.

Proctor joined Within Reason with Mike Matson on KMAN news radio Tuesday to discuss his campaign, where Matson questioned him about more than $93,000 the U.S. Department of Labor said Proctor’s company owed employees for their work.

Proctor owns Baan Thai in Manhattan and two restaurants in Leavenworth. Matson said records from the department showed Proctor’s labor law violations meant he owed over $93,000 for minimum wage and overtime back pay from work in 2014 through 2016.

In addition to Baan Thai, Proctor also had violations for The Thai Noodle, an Aggieville business that is now closed. The third restaurant involved was Proctor’s Baan Thai location in Lawrence.

Between the two Manhattan restaurants, 24 employees were owed $80,012. Records from the department’s wage and hour division show a total of $93,009 owed to 31 employees across all three restaurants, and 41 Fair Labor Standards Act violations.

Proctor said he didn’t know kitchen employees had to be paid hourly, and said it was the fault of “bureaucrats” that he was unaware salary payment was not permitted.

“One day, here comes the labor department in saying, ‘Hey, you owe all these people money because you didn’t record their hours,’” Proctor said. He said he “negotiated salaries” for workers instead of an hourly pay rate. Proctor said the negotiated payment was well over minimum wage.

“But here comes this bureaucrat into the restaurant with some regulation that we didn’t know about, and it cost us,” Proctor said. He said he couldn’t recall if the negotiated compensation was $68,000 or $78,000.

Proctor told Matson when starting his businesses he got a tax ID, filed as a corporation with the secretary of state and got a food service license from the department of agriculture and assumed the business was “ready to go.”

“But then all the letters started coming from all the other agencies that I didn’t know about,” Proctor said. “And a lot of times they came with fines because we had opened without doing this or doing that.”

Proctor said he believes if the government compliance is required, it is the government’s responsibility to ensure people are aware of the requirement.

“It always stuck with me that if the government’s going to make me do something, (in) my mind it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure I know I have to do it,” Proctor said.

The Kansas secretary of state is responsible for election oversight and managing business records filed by companies throughout the state. Proctor said if elected to the office he wants to use artificial intelligence on the secretary of state’s website to search relevant registers and ordinances and provide users registering a business with a list of links to all requirements as well as providing documentation of all regulations.

Proctor said this AI-powered information compilation would help small business owners avoid the pitfalls he experienced.

“You know, people smarter than me, they go get a lawyer to do that, and pay $1,000, $2,000,” Proctor said. “That’s a huge hurdle if you’ve got a little garage business and you’re trying to go big time.”

Proctor said in addition to utilizing AI for requirement notifications, he wants to get a law passed which would dictate no fines for regulation violations if the website didn’t specify their necessity.