Avoid Non Compliant Payroll Errors -
Avoid Stiff Fines - Jail Time
By John Trybulec
Change is consistent in the construction
industry.
Payroll changes happen almost hourly
on many construction sites because
working conditions change.
An employee may be asked to work in
his secondary classification because
the site is short of a key employee due
to weather, family emergency, sudden
illness, or a key piece of equipment
breaks down.
The payroll system must be malleable
to cope with a wide variety of reporting
differences.
Daily payroll changes for 10’s or hun-
dreds of workers is a daunting task.
A payroll change concerns the worker,
their supervisor, an admin and a payroll
administrator. Ultimately... the con-
struction company ownership can feel
the painful result of a payroll error.
That “innocent” payroll error is usually
an illegal compliance issue.
The Davis - Bacon Act of 1931 has 30+
compliance issues that must be adhered
to for every check of every employee.
Non-compliance can lead to a hefty fine
or jail time.
What can the payroll administrator of
a construction company do to easily
handle daily changes in payroll?
6
The Compliant Client system by eMars
interface captures the “dailies” from a
construction site, then submits those
changes directly into our certified
payrolls. Compliant Client then matches
the hours, electronically, submitted on
the certified payroll to the actual hours
on the construction site. This process
replaces the manual task of making
TUS Magazine • February ‘19
sure the certified payroll hours equal
the manually collected hours recorded
by the foreman.
Human error is eliminated.
The foreman can concentrate efforts on
the primary tasks, not payroll issues.
This process is referred to as: On Site
Employee Verification.
“Time is money” is the old adage that
you’ve probably said or heard hundreds
of times in your life.
It’s true.
Spending time in non-income areas of
your business is like throwing money in
the trash.
But, if you’re the CFO or the payroll
accountant, you have to pay strict
attention to your payroll, every week
of the year. Using time to make sure
every employee gets the correct pay is
critically important.
Time well spent, right?
Is your organization spending three to
10 hours or more every week making
sure that the payroll is correct and
compliant? Could that time and energy
be better spent in other areas of your
business?
Davis-Bacon and Related Acts and many
state variations.
The Davis-Bacon Act, passed by
congress in 1931, requires private
contractors to pay “prevailing wages”
to employees on all federally funded
construction projects valued more than
$2,000. Stiff fines, debarment and jail
time can result if payroll checks are not
in compliance with this act. There are
30 compliance regulations that must
be adhered to for every check. Thirty
issues for each check.
So, if you have 100 employees, that’s
3,000 possible errors every week. If you
have 500 employees, that’s 15,000 pos-
sible errors that must not happen. The
time involved to keep watch over 30
compliance issues for 100 employees is
staggering. Does your organization have
time to personally watch over every
check and every compliance issue?
The downsides to not investing the time
on this issue are:
• Angry employees
• Large fines
• Jail time
• Going out of business
But, you have to focus your time on the
weekly payroll. Right? Out-of-compliance payroll difficulties
don’t go away by saying, “I’m sorry, I
didn’t know and we’ll fix this problem
real soon.”
Compliant Client by eMars makes
running your payroll an eight-minute,
worry-free task. eMars and Compliant
Client take care of all the compliance
issues, guidelines and mandates of the Many of these financial executives do
not protect their company and its top
executives from submitting erroneous
non-compliant, illegal payrolls. Based
on a study of 100,000 payrolls, at least
Is there a possible alternative to
spending hour upon hour making all
of your checks compliant and entering
“correct” numbers and information into
your payroll database? Yes.
How many checks does your organiza-
tion handle every week? Can you catch
every error, every week? Doing payroll
by hand every week is time consuming,
costly and risky.