What to Do If You Filed on the Old WH-347

A form-version question is among the most benign things that can be wrong with a certified payroll. It is not a wage underpayment, it is not a misclassification, and it is not a false statement. The substance of what you certified — the hours, the rates, the deductions, the fact that you paid what you said you paid — is unaffected by which layout it was printed on. If a correction is needed, it is a re-presentation of the same true information on a different sheet.

This is the whole of the advice, really. Every project has someone who reviews certified payroll — a compliance administrator, a labour standards officer, a contracting officer's representative. Send them a short note saying which weeks went in on the previous version and asking whether they want those weeks resubmitted on the current form. Two sentences. That is a materially different conversation from the same subject coming up because they noticed, and it takes the question out of your hands and puts it with the party whose answer actually governs.

This is not just good manners. The standard that leads to the most serious consequence under 29 CFR 5.12(a)(1) is having "disregarded their obligations to workers or subcontractors". The distance between an error and disregard is generally made up of whether the problem recurred after it was identified, and whether the contractor found it themselves. Raising a form-version question voluntarily sits firmly on the right side of both, and it does so in writing, which is where you want it.

If a corrected payroll is wanted, produce the same weeks on the current form with the same figures. Do not take the opportunity to revise numbers unless a number was actually wrong — if something else was incorrect, that is a separate correction that should be identified as such rather than quietly folded into a reformatting. Mark the resubmission clearly so a reviewer can see it replaces a specific earlier submission rather than adding to it.

Reproducing an older payroll on the current form sometimes surfaces a real gap rather than a formatting one. The revised form asks for funded versus unfunded fringe with plan names and numbers, apprentice registration and registering body, and a wage determination number. If you cannot fill those in for a past week because the information was never captured, that is worth knowing now. It is also a reasonable thing to say to the administrator — that you can reproduce the payroll but a particular field was not recorded at the time — rather than inventing a value to fill a box.

If several weeks went in on the older layout, the reason is almost certainly that whoever prepares payroll is working from a saved copy of the form, or an export from a payroll system that produces the older field set. Correcting the submissions without correcting that leaves you doing this again. Download a fresh copy of the current form, and run one real week through it to find out which fields your system does not give you.

Same sequence, one addition. Under 29 CFR 5.5(a)(6) the prime "is responsible for the compliance by any subcontractor or lower tier subcontractor with all the contract clauses in this section", so a lower-tier sub's submissions are your exposure. Raise it with the administrator on the same note, tell the subcontractor which form to use, and ask for their next submission early enough that you can look at it before it becomes a pattern.