Painting Business Owners: Important Notes About Working with Subcontractors. #WorkersComp

So if you have subcontractors, you wanna have all of your ducks in a row to make sure you're not paying premium for people who aren't your employees. You should have their W-9s before you ever pay them, get their certificates of insurance for their workers' comp policy. Really before they ever step foot on your job site, you need to make sure that they have the state minimum of coverage for workers' comp. It protects you in the long run because claims can be super expensive. If you have a subcontractor that gets injured on your job site and they don't have coverage, that can really, really hurt you in the long run. The key for audits is record keeping, just maintaining your records for the year. You want your own internal payroll records, but then all of the records for your subcontractors as well. You want meticulous records of your employees, different class codes. You want to make sure your payroll records very clearly outline what employees were painters and what employees were not painters.