What is certified payroll?
Under the US Davis-Bacon Act, federal contractors submit payroll weekly on form WH-347 — as a SWORN statement, with penalties for falsity. A government has already decided that a timecard is a legal instrument rather than an administrative convenience.
What it actually is
Weekly. Every worker, every classification, every hour, every deduction. Submitted on form WH-347, and signed as a statement of compliance — a sworn statement, with real consequences for getting it wrong on purpose.
The purpose is prevailing-wage enforcement: making sure workers on federally-funded work are paid the going local rate for their trade. But the mechanism is what is interesting to everyone else.
Why it matters outside the US
Because it establishes a precedent about what a timecard IS. Not a note for the payroll clerk. A legal instrument, produced weekly, under oath.
Most of the construction world does not operate under Davis-Bacon and never will. But the direction of travel is not hard to read — wage-protection regimes are spreading, records requirements are tightening, and the burden of proving hours increasingly sits with the employer. Certified payroll is simply the most developed version of a thing that is arriving anyway.
What to take from it
Treat the weekly cadence as a benchmark for what disciplined looks like. If your timecards could not survive being sworn to, they will not survive a wage dispute either — and the wage dispute is coming to a jurisdiction near you regardless of whether the form does.
The practical version: contemporaneous capture, allocated hours, an approval chain with a real trail, and a record you would be willing to sign.
References
- US Davis-Bacon Act — weekly certified payroll on form WH-347, submitted as a sworn statement
Zepth is the construction project delivery platform — it runs construction, procurement and asset management on one record, and does the work: reading the drawings, reviewing the submittals, matching the invoices and flagging the risks, with a human sign-off on anything consequential.
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