Guides / Why was my certified payroll rejected?

Why was my certified payroll rejected?

A rejection almost always traces to one of a short list of causes. Here they are, the ones caught on sight first.

Reviewers see the same misses over and over. It helps to split them into two piles: the ones on the face of the form, which you can catch yourself, and the ones underneath, which only show when the payroll sits next to the wage determination.

The math does not tie out

This is the fastest rejection there is. Column 5 has to equal the daily hours in column 4. Column 9, the net, has to tie to column 7B minus the deductions in column 8, not to 7A. When a total disagrees with the parts, the reviewer stops reading and sends it back, because they cannot tell which number is wrong. The free self check walks every one of these.

A required field is blank

The wage determination number, the project location with at least the county and state, the payroll number in sequence starting at 1, the prime or subcontractor box, and the final box on your last week. Any of these missing reads as an open question, and open questions come back.

The Statement of Compliance is off

Page 2 has to be signed by someone with authority, and boxes 1, 2, 3 and 6 always have to be checked. Box 4, the apprenticeship box, cannot sit blank if any apprentice worked. An unsigned or half-checked statement voids the whole submission.

The ones underneath the form

These are the expensive ones. A worker in the wrong classification, a base rate a few cents under the determination, or fringe handled the wrong way. None of them show as a blank or a bad total. They only appear when you read the payroll against the rate sheet for that county and that kind of work.

Filed late or for the wrong week

Certified payroll is due within seven days of the pay date, every week, for the life of the contract, including weeks with no work. Holding them and dropping a stack at closeout gets the whole batch rejected.

The surface causes you can clear with the self check. The ones underneath need the determination read line by line, and that is the part I do by hand.