Lyft Inc. paid New Jersey $19.4 million following an audit by the state’s labor department that found the company deprived drivers of employment benefits by misclassifying more than 100,000 of them as independent contractors.
The audit covered 2014 to 2017 and was initially triggered when Lyft drivers filed for unemployment insurance, and the state discovered the company had not been paying into its benefits coffers, a Thursday announcement from the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development said.
Ride-hail companies like Lyft and Uber Technologies Inc. have long held that they do not employ drivers under federal and state ...