Losing a hearing before the Administrative Law Judge does not close the case. Either party may ask the Department’s Administrative Review Board to review the decision, and the request carries a hard deadline: a petition for review must actually reach the Board within 30 days of the judge’s decision, with copies delivered to every party and to the Chief Administrative Law Judge. The Chief Administrative Law Judge is a different role from the judge who heard the case — the Chief Administrative Law Judge appoints the Administrative Law Judge who hears the case, but does not hear it directly. The Board runs on actual receipt, not postmark — a document is not considered filed until it is received on or before the due date, and mailing it early buys no extra time if it arrives late. A timely petition does more than start a review; it pauses the judge’s decision. That decision stays inoperative unless and until the Board dismisses the appeal or issues a decision affirming it, so the case does not become final simply because the judge ruled.

Once a petition for review is filed, the Chief Administrative Law Judge promptly forwards a copy of the complete hearing record to the Secretary of Labor, and the Board’s eventual decision is delivered back to every party and to the Chief Administrative Law Judge. That record does not disappear once the case ends: the official record of every completed hearing in this Part 580 process stays under the custody and control of the Chief Administrative Law Judge, giving the Department and the parties a fixed reference point if the penalty is ever revisited.

A penalty only becomes collectible once it is final — whether finality comes from the Department’s own determination going unappealed, a judge’s order, or a Board decision — and at that point the amount is immediately due and payable to the Department of Labor. The person assessed the penalty must remit it promptly, by certified check or money order, through the electronic pay portal at pay.gov (or any successor system), or by another method the Department accepts. If it is not paid, the Department has several ways to collect: it can deduct the amount from other federal payments the government separately owes that person — the same offset method the example illustrates — or sue for it in a court of competent jurisdiction (a court with legal authority to hear the case) through the Solicitor of Labor (the Department’s own attorney). A court may also order payment of the penalty as part of any of three kinds of proceeding (§ 580.18(b)(3)): a civil action brought for a violation of section 15(a)(4) or a repeated or willful violation of section 15(a)(2) (specific violation categories under the Act, not covered elsewhere in this book); a section 17 action brought by the Secretary to enjoin that same conduct (have a court order the conduct stopped); or a section 16(a) criminal proceeding brought by the Department of Justice for a willful violation of the Act’s minimum wage provisions (section 6), overtime provisions (section 7), or child labor provisions (section 12).