U.S. Department of Labor Clarifies that Final Rules on Overtime Pay to be Released in July 2016

Yesterday, we reported in our blog, What Happened to those Federal Rules Revising the White Collar Exemption to Overtime Pay?, that Solicitor of Labor, M. Patricia Smith, had announced at an American Bar Association conference that the proposed rules revising the salary levels for the white collar exemptions under the Fair Labor Standards Act would not be finalized earlier than late 2016.   Nevertheless, according to the semiannual regulatory agenda (Fall-2015) published by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the proposed rules are scheduled to be finalized in July 2016, thereby rendering it likely that they will be in effect at some point toward the end of the third quarter of 2016.  Did Solicitor Smith misspeak or is the OMB overly-optimistic?  We will know soon enough.