St. Louis ? A St. Louis-area auto body repair company has reached an overtime pay settlement with the Department of Labor that will pay 969 employees in Missouri, Kansas and 18 other states $1.7 million in back wages.

An agency complaint filed in June 2001 said repair technicians at Dent Wizard International Corp., based in the St. Louis suburb of Bridgeton, Mo., were denied overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours a week. The government also accused the company of failing to keep records about hours worked. The complaint covered work from Oct. 1, 1998, to June 1, 2001.

The settlement, which was reached Jan. 27, was announced Thursday by the government.

The Labor Department sent confidential questionnaires to technicians asking the number of hours they worked. The workers’ responses formed the basis for a back-pay formula that Dent Wizard used to compute wages due. Those numbers were then verified by the Labor Department.

Dent Wizard, which removes dents from vehicles, did not admit violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. However, it agreed to distribute back wages to each technician.