Certificates and compliance

A certificate of insurance evidences coverage to a client or general contractor; it does not create it. Compliance work means making sure the policy behind the certificate actually satisfies the contract, and that every subcontractor’s coverage is verified before work starts rather than after a claim.

Certificates get treated as paperwork until the moment they are the entire dispute. A client requires specific limits, an additional insured endorsement and a waiver of subrogation; a certificate is issued saying so; the underlying policy carries none of it. Nobody discovers the gap until a claim, at which point the contract obligation is real and the coverage is not.

For staffing agencies and contractors the volume is the difficulty. Hundreds of certificates across dozens of clients, each with its own requirements, reissued at every renewal and at every new assignment. Managed by hand it fails silently — an expired certificate on file reads exactly like a current one until someone looks.

Subcontractor tracking runs the same risk in the other direction. An uninsured subcontractor is frequently charged to your workers’ compensation policy as if the workers were yours, discovered at the year-end audit, and billed as additional premium after the work is long finished and unbillable to the client.

The fix is procedural, not clever: collect the certificate before work starts, verify the endorsements rather than the certificate face, diary every expiry, and keep the requirement language from each client contract attached to the file so the certificate can be checked against what was actually promised.

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