In the USA there is a "minimum" wage, and a tip wage. The tip wage means your employer pays you $2.17/hr and you make nearly all of your income from the kindness of strangers. It's mindnumbinly aweful.
Some places do pool a percentage of tips and pay them out to the kitchen and/or bar. Usually kitchen is paid more than waitstaff, and waitstaff is also likely to be cut if it’s slow, so may get less hours. Some states allow employers to pay tip based workers below minimum wage.
Also to clarify, the rationale for tip based workers having a lower default minimum wage is that if they do not come up to the regular minimum wage with their tips+salary, then employer has to make up the difference. But usually they end up making more than minimum wage with the tips.
If you're reporting your income on your taxes then your employer literally cannot be doing that. Sure it gets averaged over your pay period, but you should still be making at least minimum wage.
When I was in Seattle the servers got min. state wage (15? at the time) & you could not split your tip unless the other person had interaction with the guest (no cooks got tips unless they did tableside cooking).
Our best server for one restaurant group rolled in last, got 300+ tips, and was cut first- usually a 3.5/4.5hr shift. Kenny was a fucking legend.