AUGUSTA (WGME) — Home health care workers in Augusta say they were told their business was shutting down effective immediately after weeks of not being paid, leaving some of their elderly clients without care.<\/p>\n
Employees at Caire Home Healthcare say they received a message Friday saying the company was closing, with no further information. <\/p>\n
\u201cI get a message that just says the company’s closing down, no explanation. no questions answered for clients or myself,\u201d Nicole Breedlove, one of seven employees at the agency, said.<\/p>\n
Breedlove says she plans to keep caring for her client despite not being paid. <\/p>\n
\u201cI have an 86-year-old client. You know she can\u2019t be without care. I\u2019ve been providing care and not getting paid, and I\u2019m going to continue to do so,\u201d Breedlove said.<\/p>\n
Workers say some employees have gone as long as three weeks without pay. <\/p>\n
\u201cRight now, we all have a check that we cannot get cashed because it\u2019s no good. We were due another paycheck today, which we\u2019re not getting paid for,\u201d personal support specialist Carla Thornton said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not right to anybody. If you\u2019re gonna get paid at the end of the week, we should be paid, too, because we did the work,\u201d personal support specialist Laurie Gaynor said. <\/p>\n
Gaynor calls it \u201ctheft of services.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cHow can you not pay dedicated workers, you know, they go in and they put their heart and soul into something, and you sit there and you blow them off like we\u2019re garbage,\u201d Gaynor said. \u201cYou know, these people deserve answers. Everybody deserves an answer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Employees say Caire Home HealthCare is a MaineCare provider and that the closure leaves 17 clients without care. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not even about our pay. It\u2019s about the clients. They\u2019re left with nothing and now no staff, I mean they\u2019re elderly, most of them are elderly and depend on us,\u201d personal support specialist Joanne Leach said.<\/p>\n
Leach says she has stopped taking shifts because of the lack of pay. <\/p>\n
\u201cI rejected all shifts this week, because it\u2019s a third week with no pay,\u201d Leach said. <\/p>\n
She also questions what happened to company funds. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhere\u2019s the money gone? Where is all the money gone that this company has received for payment. They say now that the company has a levy put on through the IRS, but if you\u2019re paying your bills, you wouldn\u2019t have a levy,\u201d Leach said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to know where the money is where the money went, we deserve answers,” Thornton said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been dedicated workers from the get-go. We have stuck by this company, and this is how we get treated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Former administrator Jessica Taylor says tax-related issues forced the company to close. <\/p>\n
\u201cDue to IRS levies and the IRS revenue officer wanting to shut the business down,\u201d Taylor said. <\/p>\n
Taylor says employees and clients were offered help finding alternate options and confirmed the company is closed for good, while also saying employees will all be paid.<\/p>\n
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services was contacted for answers, but we have not yet heard back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AUGUSTA (WGME) — Home health care workers in Augusta say they were told their business was shutting down…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":536049,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253],"class_list":["post-536048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536048\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}