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Sample deliverable
A sample compliance review
Send your last certified payroll and this is what comes back —, at no cost: a dollar-quantified read of everything that could hold a payment or trigger a penalty, each statutory finding tied to the section that carries it.
Illustrative sample — fictional contractor, illustrative figures
The documents themselves
Two specimens
The page below is a walkthrough. These are files — generated by the software that assembles a client’s deliverable, using invented companies and invented findings, and marked SPECIMEN on every page. Open them before you call. What you can check in them is exactly what you would check in your own: whether every line names the register it came from, whether it carries the date it was read, and whether the things that could not be resolved are reported as unresolved rather than quietly passed.
Both specimens describe companies that do not exist. No real company appears in either document, and neither states anything about any real company’s standing.
The certified payroll, reviewed line by line
| Worker | Classification | ST hrs | OT hrs | Base rate | Fringe rate | Gross | Review |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Worker •41 | Electrician — Journeyman | 40.0 | 0.0 | $52.10 | $19.10 | $2,848.00 | HELD§1773.1 ↗−$328.00 |
Why held. Fringe paid $19.10/hr vs $27.30/hr required by the determination — short $8.20/hr × 40 straight-time hours. | |||||||
| Worker •23 | Laborer — Group 1 | 40.0 | 0.0 | $34.20 | $22.10 | $2,252.00 | CLEARED |
| Worker •06 | Laborer — Apprentice (1st period, 70%) | 36.0 | 0.0 | $23.94 | $22.10 | $1,657.44 | HELD§1777.5 ↗ |
Why held. This worker's own rate clears. Held on the crew's apprentice-to-journeyman ratio: 1:7 worked this week against the 1:5 floor for this classification — a crew-composition finding, not a rate shortfall on this line. | |||||||
| Worker •88 | Electrician — Journeyman | 40.0 | 0.0 | $52.10 | $27.30 | $3,176.00 | CLEARED |
| Worker •54 | Carpenter — Journeyman | 32.0 | 8.0 | $46.80 | $24.50 | $2,852.00 | HELD§1815 ↗−$187.20 |
Why held. The 8 overtime hours were paid at the $71.30/hr straight-time composite rate; §1815 requires 1.5× the base rate past 8 hours/day — $94.70/hr required. Short $23.40/hr × 8 OT hours. | |||||||
| Worker •17 | Operating Engineer — Group 4 | 40.0 | 0.0 | $55.40 | $28.70 | $3,364.00 | CLEARED |
| Worker •29 | Plumber — Journeyman | 40.0 | 0.0 | $58.30 | $30.20 | $3,540.00 | CLEARED |
SAMPLE OUTPUT · ILLUSTRATIVE, NOT A CLIENT RECORD · every rate reconciled against the determination printed on the certified payroll itself, not a firm-side guess.
Findings — what would withhold your payment
Reconciliation — the overtime math, worked
The overtime hour was paid at the straight-time composite rate instead of 1.5× the base wage plus the flat fringe. Paying the OT hour at the ST rate is the single most common §1815 miss on this project type — the base wage doubles as both the ST and OT rate on the timesheet unless the payroll system is told otherwise.
Pre-flight checks — 3 cleared, 3 blocked
- DIR registration active for the work week
- Classification verified against the craft descriptions on file
- Apprentice DAS-140/142 on file (ratio flagged separately)
- Base + fringe meets the rate — failed (no netting)
- Overtime premium (1.5×) — failed on 8 hours this week
- Wage determination locked to bid date — failed
Held — three checks blocked filing
Corrected first, this filing avoids an estimated $48,200 in withheld progress payments and §1775 penalties. Filed as-is, none of it is visible on a read — it surfaces months later, at audit, as held money. That is exactly the kind of error a gate should catch before it leaves.
What the client receives — findings letter excerpt
Findings letter · SR-14 Drainage & Grading, Contract No. 07-0G7104 · week ending 08/08/2026
This week’s certified payroll shows four apparent discrepancies against the governing wage determination that we recommend correcting before you file. Three are corrections you can make this week; the fourth runs project-wide and needs the bid-date determination re-keyed once, then carried forward.
The Electrician — Journeyman fringe entry is $8.20/hr under the required rate (line 1, $328.00 this week). The Carpenter — Journeyman overtime entry was paid at the straight-time rate for 8 hours that should have carried the 1.5× premium (line 5, $187.20 this week). The apprentice-to-journeyman ratio on the Laborer crew ran 1:7 against the 1:5 floor (line 3) — no dollar figure attaches to that one, but the crew composition or a documented exception is needed before this week is filed. The fourth item, the determination used does not match the one locked to the bid-advertisement date, affects every week filed on this contract and is the larger of the four.
None of this reads as intentional to us, and we are not making a finding of fraud or a violation here — this is a pre-filing read, and the entire point of catching these lines now is to correct them before they reach an auditor rather than after. Happy to walk through the math on a call before you refile.
— Aeternus Dynamics compliance desk
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Illustrative sample only. Meridian Underground, Inc., the SR-14 project, and every worker, rate, and hour shown are fictional; all figures, names, and identifiers are invented for demonstration. Not a real client filing. Aeternus Dynamics is a compliance and advisory firm, not a law firm — nothing on this page determines legal liability, and every dollar figure shown is a conservative planning estimate prepared for illustration, not a final legal or financial determination.