Three hours into what was scheduled as a one-hour webinar, questions were still flooding in. Over 240 contractors remained online, frantically typing queries about PRC numbers, XML file errors, and supplemental benefit documentation. The panic was palpable and justified. New York State’s new electronic certified payroll reporting system had launched just weeks earlier, and nobody seemed to know exactly how to comply.
This was the scene at a recent webinar hosted by ABC Empire State in partnership with Lumber, a construction workforce management and compliance platform. What organizers expected to be a straightforward tutorial turned into an emergency triage session, revealing just how unprepared the construction industry is for New York’s sweeping new compliance requirements—and how unclear the state’s own guidance remains.
Starting January 1, 2026, New York State began requiring electronic certified payroll reporting (eCPR) for all public work and covered private construction projects. The mandate represents a seismic shift in how contractors document and prove prevailing wage compliance, adding a new layer of scrutiny to an already complex regulatory environment.
“California, Illinois, and New York are the three states with the strictest regulations in the country,” explained Jennifer Kirkman, owner and founder of Compliance Chaos Coordinator and one of the webinar’s primary presenters. With experience as both a Department of Labor auditor and a fraud investigator, Kirkman has been “in over 50 state and federal audits” and brings a rare perspective from both sides of the compliance equation.
Mark Moldenhauer, a labor and employment attorney with Bond, Schoeneck & King who advises ABC Empire State members, provided legal context throughout the session. The webinar was organized by ABC Empire State, which had received an avalanche of member questions about the new requirements.
One of the most important clarifications that emerged early in the webinar was that contractors now face a dual submission requirement. This point caused significant confusion among attendees, many of whom thought the new NYSDOL system would replace their existing reporting obligations.
“The general contractor and the owner want to monitor your certified payroll in LCP Tracker,” Kirkman explained, referencing one common platform used by awarding agencies. “That’s where you submit your payroll deduction authorization forms, your apprentice certificates, your fringe benefit statements. That is separate from the New York State DOL.”
In other words, contractors must now submit certified payrolls to:
“The New York State DOL is only concerned about what you’re submitting on the certified payroll,” Kirkman clarified. “They’re just making sure that these employees are being paid correctly because it is state-funded.”
This dual requirement effectively doubles the administrative burden, particularly for contractors still entering data manually.
As contractors attempted to comply with the new requirements, two major technical issues emerged that were preventing automated submissions:
The NYSDOL website provides an XML schema that should allow contractors to upload payroll data automatically rather than entering it manually. However, multiple contractors—including those using sophisticated software and even LCP Tracker’s engineering team—encountered consistent error messages:
“We’ve tried every scenario,” Kirkman said. “Sometimes it requires lowercase, uppercase letters. Do you put a space between the dashes? You’re really just trying anything and everything. But it’s just a defect at the moment.”
Both Lumber’s engineering team and LCP Tracker confirmed they were working to resolve the issue, but as of the webinar date, no solution existed. This means contractors must manually enter all payroll data—a process that Kirkman estimated takes five times longer than automated submission.
The second blocker proved even more frustrating: unclear guidance on required supplemental benefit documentation. When contractors attempt to certify their eCPRs on the NYSDOL portal, the system requests “benefit supplemental documentation” for any fringe benefits provided to workers.
“I, myself, and multiple subcontractors have been trying to get ahold of the New York State DOL for clarifications,” Kirkman reported. “You either can’t get through, or when you do speak to the DOL, they have no idea what they want you to submit.”
This created a compliance crisis: contractors couldn’t complete their submissions, but the clock was ticking toward penalty deadlines.
Kirkman offered pragmatic advice based on her compliance experience: “This is what I personally would do, because you want to submit something instead of nothing. You want them to reject what you submitted. You want to ask for forgiveness because we can’t ask for permission. I would submit a fringe benefit statement laying out what your fringes are for that certified payroll, who you pay to that bona fide third-party vendor.”
Her reasoning was strategic: “At least you have submitted something. The stakes are too high to just sit and do nothing, and I don’t trust that they wouldn’t waive fees and penalties.”
Perhaps the most alarming revelation from the webinar was how many contractors were attempting to navigate these requirements without basic project documentation. Question after question revealed contractors who had never received—or didn’t know they should have received—compliance packets from their projects.
“I’m really concerned that some of you guys don’t have a contract or a compliance packet,” Kirkman said, her frustration evident. “Short of getting yourself registered on the New York State DOL website, I would make getting that compliance packet and that contract your two top priorities.”
So what exactly is a compliance packet? According to Kirkman, it’s a section of the project contract (often labeled as an exhibit) that contains:
“Every compliance packet should have a fringe benefit statement that you would complete with the first certified payroll you submit,” Kirkman explained. “Your contract is your bible, your compliance bible on these projects.”
The absence of these packets created a cascade of problems. Contractors couldn’t find their PRC numbers, didn’t know which fringe benefit documentation to submit, and couldn’t determine whether their projects even fell under the new NYSDOL requirements.
Kirkman’s advice was unequivocal: “Don’t move an inch until you get that contract and you’ve read it front to back. I always say, follow the regulations until otherwise told not to in writing.”
For contractors who hadn’t yet registered on the NYSDOL portal, the webinar provided a step-by-step walkthrough. Kirkman shared screenshots from her own registration process, emphasizing that this should be completed immediately.
The registration process involves:
One critical clarification: this NYSDOL account is separate from any accounts contractors may have for other New York State functions like tax payments. “Your tax payments are probably like the state treasurer,” Kirkman explained. “This is the Department of Labor. Different departments, different parts of the government.”
When asked whether company owners who already have DOL accounts need separate ones for certified payroll, Kirkman noted that accounts are tied to federal EIN numbers, but suggested contractors might be able to add additional users. “That’s something we’d have to ask the DOL about,” she admitted, highlighting how many operational questions remain unanswered.
Once registered, contractors must enter project information, and this is where many hit their first major roadblock: the PRC number requirement.
“PRC numbers are issued for public work projects to the contracting agency, department of jurisdiction, or for covered projects to the owner or developer,” the NYSDOL website states. “If you do not have a PRC number for your project, please contact the contracting agency, the owner, or the developer for assistance.”
Simple enough in theory. In practice, webinar attendees reported that contracting agencies, owners, and developers often didn’t provide PRC numbers or didn’t respond to requests for them.
Moldenhauer, the attorney, offered strategic advice: “If I were in your shoes, because you don’t want to get caught up in the nastiness of the regulatory environment that exists here in New York, I would paper this with whoever your contracting authority is. Try to get an answer on this because I don’t know if that would be subject to Davis-Bacon, the labor law, or might be jurisdiction of both.”
His point was about creating a documented trail of good-faith effort: “At least then you can show you’ve taken every step to try to get an answer. It’s not because you didn’t want to comply. It’s because you couldn’t comply because you didn’t have a PRC.”
For contractors who do have their PRC numbers, project setup requires:
The project start date field generated significant confusion and contradictory information. Some contractors reported being told in a DOL webinar that all projects should use January 1, 2026, as the start date, regardless of when work actually began. Others were entering actual project start dates from 2024 or 2025.
Kirkman shared her California experience as a cautionary tale: “June 1, DIR went active. Sent out an email: ‘You do not have to retro submit any eCPRs.’ By June 20, I got an email, and I had to go back and submit 800 certified payrolls because I was on 23 projects. It was brutal.”
Her recommendation: “I entered the start date because that’s what the start date is. It’s true. You have to always submit true and accurate data when you’re working with the government. If they tell you otherwise—‘we want everybody to have a start date of 01/01’—that could be the case. But I don’t think it starts ticking until 2026.”
Hinck from Lumber added: “As of right now, it’s good to just be on the safe side. Sometimes these things change, but we’re just going to do the best that we can.”
One attendee reported that “it was confirmed on a DOL webinar yesterday that 01/01/2026 is the start date no matter when the project started,” which seemed to settle the question—though the inconsistency in guidance highlights the chaotic rollout of these requirements.
An important exemption emerged during the discussion: purely federal projects are not subject to the NYSDOL eCPR requirements.
“If you’re federally funded only, the state has no jurisdiction over that,” Kirkman explained. “The New York State DOL kicks in as soon as state funding kicks in. If it’s a dually funded project—federal and state—you’ll have to submit. But if it’s federal only, you don’t have to do anything because you’re just subject to the federal regulations.”
However, this created its own confusion. Multiple contractors reported working on projects where they weren’t certain about the funding source. One asked about projects for “local authorities in New York State, for example, a school or library in Westchester. Is it possible that there are no PRC numbers because it was funded at the local city council level and not the state level?”
Both Kirkman and Moldenhauer emphasized the same answer: “Reference your contract.”
Moldenhauer elaborated: “If it’s purely a federal contract, New York State doesn’t have any jurisdiction over it, so they shouldn’t be applying their Article 8 standards. But I think the best way to answer that question on a given contract is looking at that contract document itself and seeing whether or not New York State does have a basis for exerting jurisdiction over it.”
For contractors uncertain about jurisdiction, Moldenhauer recommended getting written confirmation: “I would just want to get some confirmation from the person above me in the food chain that Article 8 doesn’t apply and that there’s no electronic certified payroll filing obligation.”
The NYSDOL website contains seemingly contradictory guidance about submission frequency. In one place, it states that “payroll submissions are due every 30 days from the project start date.” In another, it instructs contractors that they “must submit weekly payroll.”
Kirkman’s recommendation was unequivocal: weekly submission, no exceptions.
“Although the New York State DOL website says you have 30 days, I tell everybody if you’re submitting weekly to LCP Tracker, eLation, whatever program the entity is asking you to submit to, you might as well just do the New York State DOL at the same time. Keep it weekly.”
Her reasoning was both practical and strategic: “Don’t think about the 30 days because what’s going to happen is you’re going to get to the 30 days, and you’re going to have four to submit instead of just one. If you have problems now, you have four CPRs that are late. That’s $100 a day, I’m assuming, times four. Leave yourself room for errors. If you have a problem after week one, you have three weeks to fix it.”
The federal standard for certified payroll submissions is 7 to 10 days from the week-ending date, and Kirkman strongly advised following this timeline for state submissions as well.
With XML uploads not functioning, contractors must manually enter payroll data for each employee, each week. Kirkman walked through the process, which requires:
For each employee:
“You cannot move forward unless there is a number in every single one of these boxes,” Kirkman noted. “If you just put 8888, you’ll get an error message. You have to manually calculate. It doesn’t take $110 times 40 hours and give you $4,400. You have to manually enter it into the system.”
For employees with deductions beyond standard taxes (child support, garnishments, union dues, uniforms, tools), contractors must itemize each deduction. For employees receiving supplemental benefits (health and welfare, pension, training, etc.), contractors must itemize each benefit with its hourly value.
After entering all this data, contractors must then certify the information via an “Acknowledgment and Declaration,”—and this is where many are getting stuck on the supplemental benefit documentation requirement.
Kirkman estimated that manual entry takes approximately five times longer than automated XML upload. For her California projects, manually entering 21 certified payrolls took five hours; with XML files, the same task took less than one hour.
The requirement to upload “supplemental benefit documentation” when certifying payroll has become the primary blocker preventing contractors from completing their submissions.
The NYSDOL portal states: “Provide documentation of each fund, plan, or program where any supplemental has been paid or provided for.”
But what documentation? The state hasn’t specified, and DOL representatives contacted by multiple contractors couldn’t provide clear guidance.
Kirkman’s interpretation, based on her experience across multiple states: “Most states call them a fringe benefit statement. Maybe in New York, it’s called a supplemental benefit document. That’s the million-dollar question we’re all trying to figure out.”
A fringe benefit statement typically documents:
One critical compliance point Kirkman emphasized: “Fringes have to be paid to a third-party bona fide vendor. You can’t be holding out fringes on an employee’s paycheck and keeping it in your bank account. You can’t store it on your financials and keep that money in your bank account.”
For contractors who pay all fringes in cash directly to employees (adding the fringe amount to the base hourly rate), the documentation requirement shouldn’t apply—they should select “no” when asked if supplemental benefits are provided.
The confusion arises for contractors who do pay into third-party benefit plans but don’t know what documentation will satisfy the DOL.
Questions from webinar attendees illustrated the complexity:
Kirkman’s consistent advice: when in doubt, submit something that demonstrates good-faith effort, document your attempts to get clarification, and be prepared to revise if the DOL rejects your submission or provides additional guidance.
Another area of confusion centered on “no-work weeks”—periods when a contractor remains under contract on a project but performs no work that week.
The NYSDOL system requires contractors to account for every week from the project start date until the final payroll is marked as such. This means contractors must either submit a regular payroll or submit a “no-work week” certification.
For contractors doing seasonal work (like roofers who can’t work during winter weather), this creates a reporting burden. One attendee asked: “We currently have 12 New York public works jobs that have a start date in 2025, but are currently having no work done because we are roofers and the weather prohibits us from completing the job until next spring. Will we have to submit no-activity CPRs by the end of this month for those 12 jobs, or create the file and enter the job when we become active again in a couple of months?”
Kirkman’s answer: submit no-work weeks. “Although you’re inactive, that doesn’t mean your contract has ended. You’re still contractually obligated to the compliance requirements on that job. I would submit no-work weeks. Even if it’s for the next eight months, at least you’re holding up your end of the deal.”
She referenced her own experience: “I myself have submitted three months’ worth of no-work weeks. I’ve had subcontractors submit a year, because you just don’t know if something’s going to happen at the end of the job where they’re going to have to come back and do any work.”
The risk of marking a payroll as “final” prematurely is that if you do return to the job site later, you’ll have to go back and submit retroactive no-work weeks, “and it kind of raises a red flag. Auditors start asking why isn’t there better communication on the job site? Why isn’t there a better schedule? We want to prevent any red flags from popping up that bring attention to these projects.”
However, contractors who are definitively done with a project should mark their final payroll as such: “If it’s your last payroll, make sure you mark it because that stops the compliance on the project. If you don’t mark that and it’s your final, they’re going to be expecting certified payrolls after that.”
Throughout the webinar, the question of penalties came up repeatedly, with one contractor even asking: “What are the fines and fees for not submitting? Seems like more of a hassle doing this. I may just want to pay the fees.”
Kirkman’s response was emphatic: “Oh no, no, never do that. You call me, I’ll do it for you. Never, ever do that.”
The stated penalty is $100 per day for each certified payroll not submitted. While that might seem manageable for a single late payroll, the consequences compound quickly:
Direct Penalties:
Audit Triggers:
Audit Findings Can Result In:
Willful Violations:
Moldenhauer emphasized the holistic nature of audits: “Whenever they do an audit, they’re not just looking at one discrete thing. They’re doing a very holistic audit. If they find something else that you tripped up on, it’s extremely punitive if you’re found in violation of Article 8.”
He strongly advised against actions that would make contractors “stand out like a sore thumb”: “I would not want to do anything that would cause your company to kind of stand out. One result of this electronic certified payroll filing is that if you’re not complying with this, they are going to be all over you.”
A recurring theme throughout the webinar was the ultimate responsibility that general contractors bear for all workers on their projects, including those employed by subcontractors.
“The prime contractors are responsible for their subs,” Moldenhauer explained. “No matter what process is being set up for subcontractors to submit certified payroll information, the prime still does have a responsibility to make sure it’s being done correctly. You need some sort of mechanism to police that.”
This creates a challenge: subcontractors are responsible for submitting their own eCPRs to the NYSDOL portal, but GCs remain liable if those submissions aren’t completed properly.
Kirkman’s recommendations for GCs:
For subcontractors, the message was equally clear: get clarity in writing about who is responsible for eCPR submission.
“If you’re the subcontractor, you are responsible for uploading your own eCPRs to the DOL website,” Kirkman explained. “But if your general contractor wants to take on that responsibility of entering it on your behalf, you can do that. Your job is just to make sure that they are submitted weekly.”
Several subcontractors asked whether they needed to submit if their GC was handling it. The answer: clarify your arrangement in writing, but remember that ultimately, “if the subs can’t pay the penalty, then you [the GC] are going to end up paying it. You’re responsible for them.”
Contractors frequently asked about workers who perform multiple classifications on the same day—for example, someone who works four hours as an operator and four hours as a laborer.
“Do you enter it twice for each classification?” one attendee asked.
“Yes,” both Kirkman and Moldenhauer confirmed.
Moldenhauer added an important operational point: “You need to make sure you’re being very careful about how the employees are recording their time on the job site and that if they’re doing multiple trades, they’re accurately recording their amount of time spent on each trade.”
This is where Lumber’s time and attendance feature becomes relevant. Hinck explained: “Employees can literally clock out of one classification—from 8 to 11 they’re working as an operator—and then they’ve got to flip over to laborer. Right there, they can log out as that operator, log in as a laborer, and you can track very accurately. That information is sent directly to your office. You can see real-time what these employees are doing on the job site.”
Apprentice ratio compliance emerged as “the most difficult and the most costly to subcontractors across all states,” according to Kirkman.
The rules vary by collective bargaining agreement and classification. “It can be 6:3, 4:2, 5:1, 1:1, 2:1, but you always have to refer to the collective bargaining agreement and the contract,” Kirkman explained.
For nonunion contractors with apprentices, determining the applicable ratio proved challenging. Moldenhauer acknowledged he would need more information to answer definitively but suggested looking at the contract itself for specific ratios.
Critical compliance points for apprentices:
The question of salaried employees performing trade work generated strong warnings from both Kirkman and Moldenhauer.
“When you’re talking salaried employees on a prevailing wage project, auditors don’t like that,” Kirkman said bluntly. “It has to be broken out, and you will be writing letters of explanation. You will be giving itemizations. I always tell people, if they’re salary, you’ve got to flip them to hourly. That’s per the regulations.”
Moldenhauer emphasized documentation: “Any doubt is going to be construed in favor of paying the employee—it’s going to be construed against the employer. My recommendation, if you’re having salaried people who do trade work, is that you’re documenting that as carefully as possible, and when it’s happening.”
The challenge with salaried employees is that they typically don’t record time with the detail required for prevailing wage compliance. “It’s harder to break out that time,” Moldenhauer noted, which is precisely why it becomes “a headache for auditors.”
Contractors asked whether warranty work performed months after project completion requires prevailing wage compliance.
Moldenhauer’s answer for New York: “Warranty work will be considered subject to Article 8.”
This differs from some other states where prevailing wage obligations end when the project is complete. For New York contractors, this means:
One of the most passionate exchanges in the webinar centered on whether contractors could succeed with prevailing wage compliance using standard accounting software versus specialized prevailing wage platforms.
About Sage: “Sage is a job costing accounting software. It has limitations. Sage is not in the certified payroll prevailing wage business. They will outsource it to a Lumber, for example. If you’re in Sage 300, Premier, QuickBooks, whatever accounting program you’re working in, to successfully succeed on these prevailing wage projects, you need a very strong prevailing wage payroll system. It can’t be done otherwise.”
She used an analogy: “It would be like asking my plumber to come in and paint my house. Although he can paint my house, his forte is plumbing. Sage’s forte is job costing and accounting, not prevailing wage compliance.”
Kirkman’s perspective comes from direct experience with the consequences: “As an auditor, one of the things I would ask the people I was auditing is, ‘Why is your compliance so bad? What is causing you so much grief?’ It was the programs they were using I would tell them you need to find something that works with your company, not one where you’re trying to redo your entire business model to conform to a program that isn’t designed for prevailing wage compliance payroll.”
The time difference is substantial. In 2025, working with inadequate systems, Kirkman “worked about 70 hours a week, didn’t take a day off, not one,” managing compliance for 23 California projects.
Her recommendation: “You really have to have both—a compliance officer and a strong prevailing wage payroll system. Lumber is the machine that drives the information that the compliance officer translates and puts into the system. The compliance officer translates the regulations and follows them. You can have the meanest and the latest machine, but if somebody doesn’t know how to drive it, it’s not any good. You can be the best compliance officer and not have a good prevailing wage software company and still have the same outcome.”
For contractors considering whether the investment in specialized software is worthwhile, she offered this perspective: “What takes you one hour will take you five hours manual versus using an electronic software program. You can go from doing six projects to 15 projects because you’re eliminating the time component. It can eliminate a whole person in your department from doing the compliance requirements.”
As the three-hour webinar drew to a close, several clear action items emerged for New York contractors:
Immediate Actions (This Week):
Short-Term (This Month):
Strategic (Next Quarter):
Documentation Best Practices:
ABC Empire State indicated they would provide several resources following the webinar:
The confusion and challenges revealed in this webinar point to systemic issues in how states are implementing electronic prevailing wage reporting.
New York is not alone in this trend. California’s DIR system, Illinois’s IDOL platform, and now New York’s eCPR system represent a nationwide movement toward digitized compliance monitoring. The stated goals are laudable: reduce fraud, ensure workers receive proper wages, and create transparency in public spending.
However, the implementation challenges raise important questions:
Regulatory Clarity: When the state’s own DOL representatives cannot answer basic questions about required documentation, contractors are left in an impossible position—damned if they don’t submit (penalties), damned if they submit incorrectly (potential audit triggers).
Technical Readiness: Launching a mandatory system with known XML schema errors that prevent automated uploads creates an unreasonable manual burden, particularly for smaller contractors without dedicated administrative staff.
Retroactive Enforcement: The California precedent Kirkman described—where contractors were initially told they didn’t need to submit retroactive payrolls, then three weeks later were required to submit hundreds of past reports—creates justified anxiety about relying on any verbal guidance.
Cascading Liability: The structure where GCs remain liable for subcontractor compliance, but subcontractors must submit their own eCPRs, creates a coordination challenge that multiplies across project tiers.
Resource Inequality: Larger contractors with dedicated compliance staff and sophisticated software will navigate these requirements more easily than smaller firms operating with general accounting software and part-time bookkeepers. This could inadvertently consolidate the industry.
As Moldenhauer noted, “It’s very difficult for contractors to come out of any audit completely clean all the time, partly because it’s so regulated and so technical.”
The regulatory environment is creating a reality where perfect compliance may be nearly impossible, yet the penalties for imperfect compliance are severe enough to threaten business viability.
What began as a webinar about a new reporting system evolved into a masterclass on prevailing wage compliance in one of the nation’s most regulated construction markets.
The message was clear: contractors who treat this as merely a paperwork requirement will find themselves facing audits, penalties, and potentially debarment. Those who invest in proper systems, expertise, and processes will not only avoid those consequences but may find compliance becomes a competitive advantage.
“Your contract is your bible,” Kirkman repeated throughout the session. But equally important is having the expertise to interpret that bible and the tools to execute its requirements efficiently.
For New York contractors navigating this new landscape, the path forward requires three elements:
As one webinar attendee put it in the chat: “You have explained this 100% better than the DOL. It was a big disappointment and did not answer a lot of the questions asked.”
That a three-hour emergency webinar hosted by an industry association and a software company provided more practical guidance than the state agency responsible for the regulations speaks volumes about the challenges contractors face.
In the absence of clear official guidance, the construction industry is doing what it has always done: sharing knowledge, pooling resources, and figuring out solutions collaboratively. ABC Empire State’s willingness to host extended sessions, Lumberfi’s commitment to solving technical challenges like the XML schema errors, and practitioners like Kirkman sharing hard-won expertise represent the industry at its best.
The NYSDOL eCPR requirement is now a reality. The system is imperfect, the guidance is incomplete, and the learning curve is steep. But for contractors willing to invest in proper compliance infrastructure, this challenge is manageable—and the alternatives are far too costly to contemplate.
Contact information:
.png)
