Written on 06 August 2020.

A superintendent's nightmare in public works construction | Dump Trucks Charlotte NC

When a Project Takes a Turn for the Worse

You’re neck deep into a $750 Million project, and the owner is breathing down your neck. You have over seventy subcontractors each sending you separate daily logs for well over five hundred workers. Some subs still drop off paper logs to the site trailer every day. Others use one of the many mobile applications to send them electronically. And every sub has their own reliable (hopefully) administrative staff that takes care of payroll and compliance. But you have everything under control, right? Or do you?

What started out as an inquiry about only one worker’s supposed underpayment has turned into a full-blown investigation. As it turned out, some of the hours submitted on a daily log did not match those entered on a certified payroll report (CPR). Now a state compliance auditor is here and is poring over your records. More discrepancies are found.

In fact, in a sample size of thousands of daily logs and hundreds of certified payroll reports submitted since the beginning of the project, there are several inconsistencies between the daily logs and CPRs. There are multiple weeks where hours do not match up. Other cases involve overtime being misreported.

Then there are the instances of worker information not matching. Workers appear on daily logs that are not accounted for on the corresponding CPRs. And vice versa. Even some of the worker information does not make sense. Was the name misspelled on the daily log? Or is this an entirely different person shown on the CPR? It’s hard to tell on such a large project.

But wait, there’s more. It’s discovered that some of the workers’ crafts that appear on the logs are not the same as those submitted on certified payroll reports. This led to misclassifications and therefore incorrect wage rates being applied on payroll. Why is this happening? It is a clerical error? Did the worker transition into a new craft and someone forgot to update this in the payroll solution? Now the auditor is looking into all seventy subs and finds three more violations for more than forty additional workers.

Violations, Fines, Penalties… and Did We Mention Fines?

Things seem to be spiraling out of control. The auditors uncover hundreds of mistakes, many of them resulting in the underpayment of workers – over $450,000 worth in total. Luckily, a majority of these cases were not issues with your employees; they were the subcontractors’ mistakes.

But then it turns out that one of the larger subs (who committed the largest share of the violations) was operating on too tight of a budget. They simply cannot pay its workers the back wages due. The sub files for bankruptcy, and the now the auditors are saying that you, the prime contractor, are liable to cover these. This is the law.

It doesn’t end there. The severity of the violations leads to the auditing agency tacking on a slew of penalties and fines. They stack on top of each other. Combined with the restitution payments, you are now faced with additional expenses in excess of $700,000 that you, as the superintendent, did not account for. How did we get here?

The Devil is in the Details

A nightmare this extreme is entirely possible on a project like this, but it does not mean things can’t turn equally as catastrophic on a smaller scale. The unfortunate part is a situation this grim is avoidable. It’s just that a majority of the columbus oh dump truck company (and their superintendents) don’t know it.

When it comes to project management, there are plenty of tools on the market that can help make processes – like recording time entry, progress updates, columbus oh dump trucks usage, jobsite material deliveries, safety meetings, weather reporting, etc. – much easier. But almost all of these solutions (there’s only one exception) fail at preventing the scenario above. And that’s because they don’t integrate with prevailing wage and workforce compliance tools. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

The Right Solution

As a superintendent, imagine being able to receive all seventy daily logs each day from all of your subs in one centralized place from the same mobile app. Then imagine receiving a combined daily report that succinctly delivers a snapshot of all the relevant data you need at a glance. Better yet, envision this application also automatically cross-checking the data entered on daily logs with data submitted on electronic CPRs. All discrepancies would be spotted right as they occur, not when the auditor shows up.

What if this application then notified columbus oh dump truck company of these inconsistencies and then forced them to rectify the issues right then and there, before they could proceed with submitting their CPRs? You would never have to worry again of having another nightmare situation on your hands.

This product would not only make your life easier; it would make your foremen’s life easier. Consider their experience for a moment. What if they didn’t have to waste frivolous amounts of time entering workers into their project management system? What if worker profiles could be auto-populated from records that have already been created in an electronic certified payroll tool? How much time could they save if they just copied a previous daily log and made minor adjustments as needed rather than starting with a blank slate each day?

Better yet, imagine your foremen not having to enter worker hours manually at all. Instead, picture workers showing up to the jobsite each day and swiping their employee badge, or tapping their RFID fob, or scanning their fingerprint to enter the site and clock in. And at the end of their shift, after they’ve clocked out by the same token, the worktime is calculated and auto-populated on the daily log. Then at the end of the day, all the foreman would have to do is pull up the log, verify the craft columbus oh dump truck company performed, and submit.

And then, of course, when it comes time to produce certified payroll reports, the administrative staff would see with just a click of a button whether the payroll data matches the daily reports.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is… efficiency doesn’t just begin and end at the top. It’s needed at every step and every level of the process. Do you want to be a more successful superintendent in public works construction? Then you will need a solution that does more than provide jobsite management tools. You will need a comprehensive and integrated system with checks and balances that ensures that you are both on track and in compliance.

There is only one comprehensive solution out there that does this: LCPtracker’s suite of products. It starts with the one-two punch of their Daily Reporter Mobile application and their flagship compliance software, LCPtracker Pro. And with their access management tool (currently in development), columbus oh dump truck company will finally have the trifecta: automated time entry, worker access control, and closed-loop reporting – something that is critical in helping mitigate compliance risk. No longer will columbus oh dump truck company have to juggle multiple applications serving various functions that don’t share a common data hub.

LCPtracker is unmatched in their ability to ensure the level of accuracy needed to avoid penalties and fines. For more information on LCPtracker’s product offerings, visit https://lcptracker.com/.