Behind on certified payroll: how to catch up

You won the job, the crew worked, the filings did not happen. This is one of the most common situations in California public works, it is fixable, and the order you fix it in matters. Here is the plan.

First, the part nobody says out loud: being behind is normal. Subs win a project, mobilize in a week, and discover the compliance stack after the second payroll. Or the bookkeeper who knew the portal left. Or the GC asked for LCPtracker uploads, those happened, and months later someone learns the state filing was a separate thing all along. The system is genuinely confusing, and the fix is mechanical. What makes the difference is speed, because every mechanism that can hurt you gets stronger with time: the withheld payment lever, the records request clock, and the compounding pile itself.

Step 1: freeze the bleeding on the current week

Before touching the backlog, get the current payroll week filed on time. The backlog is a stock, the new weeks are a flow, and a backlog that grows while you work it never closes. If you take one action today, make it this one.

Step 2: size the gap, per project

For each active public works project, list:

• Weeks worked, from your daily reports or time records
• Weeks filed to DIR, which you can see against each project in the DIR portal
• Weeks filed to any awarding body portal the contract requires
• Weeks with no work on that project. These are not free passes: the eCPR format supports a statement of non performance, and gaps in your payroll sequence read as missing filings until accounted for.

The result is a filing matrix: project by week, with three possible states each: filed, owed, or non performance. This matrix is also exactly what you want in hand if anyone asks about your records, because it shows the gap is being closed deliberately.

Step 3: generate the back filings, oldest first, correctly

Back filings are ordinary filings with old dates. The same rules apply: real hours from your time records, classifications matching the project's prevailing wage determination, fringes and deductions in the right units, arithmetic that reconciles. Two cautions carry extra weight in catch-up mode:

• Do not reconstruct from memory. Generate from the payroll records you actually ran. Certified payroll is signed under penalty of perjury, and a backfilled guess is a worse problem than a late filing.
• If the underlying pay was wrong, fix the pay first. Catching up on filings that document an underpayment documents the underpayment. Where a rate was below the determination, correct the wages, then file records reflecting reality, and get advice if the amounts are material. The penalty machinery is described in our penalties guide.

Sequence matters for the state system too: payroll numbers run in order, and amendments to already-filed weeks must match the original filing's identifying fields. Filing oldest to newest keeps the sequence clean.

Step 4: file everywhere you owe

Work the matrix: the DIR eCPR for each owed week on non-exempt projects, the federal WH-347 where federal funds are in the job, and the awarding body's portal where the contract requires one. If a records request is already pending, produce what exists immediately and keep producing as you generate, rather than waiting to deliver a complete set. The 10 day clock under Labor Code 1776 does not pause for perfectionism.

Step 5: install a cadence so this never recurs

The backlog came from somewhere: no owner, no reminder, no system. Whatever you choose, choose something with a weekly heartbeat, because the federal form is weekly and treating the state filing as weekly too keeps every contract variant satisfied. A calendar reminder and a named owner beat good intentions. A service with a weekly reminder built in beats both.

How we handle catch-up, specifically

Back filings are one of the most common ways subs start with us. The process is the same as our normal service, run in batch: you send the payroll exports covering the gap, we map your format once, generate every missed week in sequence, validate each file, and a person reviews the set before anything is staged. Multiple back weeks typically move in one session, and the same mapping then produces your go-forward weekly filings so the backlog stays closed. Your first filing is free, the pricing is on the home page, and if the gap is big, honestly, that is the case we built the batch process for.