Whitepaper

Screening New York State certified payrolls against published prevailing-wage schedules

New York State publishes two datasets that, taken together, permit a systematic compliance screen that today is performed only by complaint: the certified-payroll wage lines filed with the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Public Work, published on data.ny.gov, and the Department’s own prevailing-wage rate schedules.

We joined 588,505 public-work wage lines (January–July 2026) against a rate library built from the effective-dated schedules, using conservative rules at every step. Of 554,606 screenable journeyworker lines, 24,947 (4.5%) report a cash wage below the lowest scheduled journeyworker rate mappable to their trade, county and week. A second screening pass built entirely from the same public sources explains away much of that signal — 26.0% of flagged lines exactly match published apprentice rates, and 5.5% exactly match a different classification’s journeyworker rate — leaving a standing set of 6,835 high-confidence findings across 468 contractors, approximately $1.75M in indicative cash-wage shortfall.

The screen independently flagged the one firm in the data with an adjudicated willful-violation record (EGL Drainage Solutions & Repairs, debarred July 2025), with every cited rate hand-verified against the schedule PDF. All findings are allegations that prioritize human review; none is a determination. An appendix describes how the same analysis is performed for New York City, where a completed pilot demonstrates the method on the Comptroller’s §220 certified-payroll database.

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