My husband's office was bought from another company out of state. The former owner is in Illinois. Several employees have expense checks that have not been received from the former owner. Do they have any recourse other than to just wait until the former owners decided to cut their checks?

Generally speaking, no. There is no law in any state except California that requires the employer to reimburse personally incurred business-related expenses. If the employees have bona fide, enforceable contracts that require the payment within a certain period of time, and that time period has expired, it's possible that there may be a breach of contract.

Mergers and acquisitions take some time to work through and to get all the procedures set up and it's not surprising that reimbursement of expenses might be one of these situations. Have the employees contacted the appropriate person in Accounts Payable? What do they say?

They call every day and every day get a different response. It was, at first, "they're in the mail"; then it was "we will cut them Friday"; the last story was "we sent them but they must have gotten lost; we'll have to cancel those checks and issue new ones."

Ask to speak with the supervisor of A/P or the manager of Accounting.

What is the California Law in expenses?

Paragraph 2802
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&group=02001-03000&file=2800-2810