Finance & AccountingFree
Workers Comp Premium Audit Response
River recomputes the audit worksheet one employee at a time, prices every disputed line, and writes the reclassification with its duty evidence.
Everything written about this is about posture. Have the registers ready, collect a certificate from every subcontractor, separate the overtime, be in the room, ask for the worksheet afterwards. All of it is correct and none of it is arithmetic. The worksheet is a rate multiplied by a payroll figure for each class code, so the only thing that moves the number is moving payroll between codes, and that has to be argued one employee at a time.
One at a time, because there is no such thing as sixty percent clerical. The rating manual says plainly that Codes 8810, 8871, 8742 and 8748 are not available for division of payroll. Where a standard exception employee's work spreads across several codes, the whole payroll goes to the highest rated classification code that represents any part of that work. So every disputed person is a binary. Either the duties clear the test or the salary sits at the field rate.
Written for the controller who has 60 days to answer a worksheet, and for the bookkeeper at a contractor where one wrong code costs more than the year's software budget. The register it reads against is the one built in the payroll journal pack, the rates tie out through the filing reconciliation, and whether a worker belongs on the register at all is a separate question. All of this assumes the carrier has sent the worksheet. If it has not, ask before anything else, because its rates are what every line is computed from.
The line the meeting is about is 7.86 percent of the money
Run the worked example below and the audit meeting is being held about the wrong person. The office manager who covers the yard counter, which is the argument everybody has, is worth 3,958.76 dollars. Two site superintendents the auditor left in the governing carpentry code are worth 16,814.59, and the evidence is two job descriptions and a signed duty statement. Together with one more line, 62.00 percent of the money sits in places nobody looks, because neither is a clerical argument.
The uncomfortable half of that is a line running the other way. An estimator sat in outside sales, and the manual says that classification is not assigned to employees who perform job site measurements or inspections to prepare bids for a job for a construction contractor. Correcting it costs 14,403.40, which is why the net ask is 18,723.91 rather than 33,127.31. Over the three years the error has been on the policy it is 43,210.20, more than the whole dispute.
Then the findings get ranked twice, and the two orders disagree. By dollars the overtime line is second largest. By what the evidence costs it is last, returning 561.54 dollars an hour against 8,407.29 for the superintendents, because excluding overtime means re-cutting twelve months of registers by employee and by class. Worth knowing which of those two the available week goes to, given that NCCI reports approximately 36 percent of policies in Codes 8810 or 8742 change classification on inspection.
How it works
Add the worksheet
Upload the carrier's audit worksheet, the payroll register by employee, and the class codes on the policy.
Describe the duties
Say what each disputed person actually does, where they do it, and what separates them from the hazard.
River prices each line
It recomputes premium at both codes per employee, quotes the rule, and ranks the findings twice.
Send the response
File the reclassification with its evidence, and concede the lines the manual does not support.
What you get
- Every disputed employee priced at both class codes, with the rate spread and the modification applied
- The manual rule behind each line, quoted, so the response argues from text rather than from fairness
- The lines that run against you, found before the carrier's own classification reviewer finds them
- Findings ranked by what the evidence costs, not only by the size of the dollar figure
- The duty evidence each reclassification needs, named document by document for each person
- What the additional premium becomes after the response, and what it becomes if you overreach
Common questions
Can we just split an employee between two codes?
Usually not, and this is the assumption that costs the most. The interchange of labor rule allows payroll to be divided between basic classifications, but the standard exceptions are carved out of it, so a clerical, outside sales or automobile sales employee is either wholly in that code or wholly out. Percentage allocations for those people are not available at any level of recordkeeping.
What does it need from us?
The worksheet, the payroll register by employee, and the codes on the policy. Then the duties, which is the part nobody brings: what each disputed person does, where they physically sit, and what stands between them and the operation. A partition, a counter or a separate building is worth more to the argument than any job title, because those are the words the manual uses.
Why disclose an error that runs against us?
Because a classification review reads every employee rather than the ones you named, so the choice is whether you find it or their reviewer does. In the worked example that line is 14,403.40 dollars in the year under audit and 43,210.20 across the three years it has been on the policy, which is more than everything the response is trying to recover.
Is this about the payroll total or the codes?
Both, and they are different arguments. Remuneration disputes are about what counts: overtime extra pay, per diem, the value of housing, officer caps. Classification disputes are about where payroll sits. The second is where the multiples are, because a rate spread of nine dollars per hundred applied to one salary beats almost any adjustment to the total.
What if we kept no time records?
Then say so, and price the lines that do not depend on them. A superintendent whose duties are supervisory needs a job description rather than a timesheet, and clerical separation is a fact about the building. Overtime exclusion does need the records, and getting them is why that line is ranked last per hour even when it is the larger number.
Does this replace a premium audit consultant?
It does the arithmetic and the rule citations a consultant charges a contingency for, and it hands you a filing rather than an opinion. Where a genuine classification dispute goes to the rating bureau, the same worksheet is what you send. Changes made to the register during the year are worth reviewing in the payroll change audit before the next audit.
Workers Comp Premium Audit Response
Fill in the form and your workspace opens with the work already underway.