Reconciling two years of benefit deductions and I-9 records

A facilities and maintenance services business employing 300 people, running state prevailing wage with certified payroll reporting. We worked on it for three months. The scope grew during that time to include vendor communication and full benefits enrolment and correction. The project is complete. All employment decisions, benefit plan design and employee conversations stayed with the client throughout.

Benefit deductions had not matched employee elections for about two years, in both directions. Some people had too little taken, which meant the company was absorbing a cost the employee had agreed to pay. Others had too much taken, which meant the company was deducting more than it was entitled to. About $50,000 of difference across 300 people.

The check that would have caught it belonged to nobody. Three records have to agree: the payroll deduction file, the carrier invoice, and what the employee actually chose. Payroll owns the first, finance pays the second, HR files the third. Each gets checked on its own and each looks fine. The problem only surfaced when the three were compared together, and because no one owned that reconciliation, the check was never performed.

I-9 documentation was scattered, incomplete in places, and in some cases missing entirely. Missing is the serious one, because a missing I-9 cannot be found later. It has to be completed again from scratch.

We did the three-way comparison, person by person. Deduction file against carrier invoice against election record, for all 300 employees, across the period involved. Then we corrected it in both directions, including the people who were owed money back. Fixing only the direction that favors the company is not a reconciliation, it is a collection.

We gave that check an owner and a schedule, so it runs every cycle now instead of being nobody's job. That was the point of the engagement. Finding $50,000 once is worth less than making sure it cannot build up again.

We worked through the whole I-9 file. Some forms were scattered across locations and needed gathering. Some were incomplete and needed correcting. Some were missing and had to be completed fresh, correctly dated, with the limitations that carries. We also had to chase individual employees for documents, which is slow and largely outside anyone's control.

On the prevailing wage side, every state is its own rule set rather than a variation on one you already know. The determinations differ, the reporting formats differ, and how fringe counts against the wage obligation differs. Getting a classification wrong is not a paperwork error, it is an underpayment.

The $50,000 was identified and corrected in both directions, and the client repaid the employees who had been over-deducted. That is the part worth reading twice. Told that their own process had been wrong for two years, they chose to make people whole rather than quietly correct it going forward.

It is not $50,000 that arrived in the client's bank account, and we would rather say so. Some of it was money the company owed its own staff.

The I-9 file is now complete. Every current employee has a correct I-9 on record.