Rice Business Report May 2019 Rice Business Report

6 Is Your Company SCA Compliant? Figure It Out Before the United States Department of Labor Figures It Out for You Continued from page 5……. Labor category mapping, however, is an inexact science at best and is often an exercise fraught with po- tential liability for federal service contractors. A typical DOL SCA WD contains a wide range of labor cate- gories, and the DOL has published a SCA Directory of Occupations (link available online at http:// www.DOL.gov/whd/govcontracts/sca.htm) to aid federal contractors in mapping personnel to the appro- priate labor categories. While SCA labor category mapping may be obvious for certain types of tradition- al service contracts (i.e., personnel that only clean windows as part of SCA covered contract are Window Cleaners, Occupation Code 11360), mapping becomes significantly more complicated and subjective for contracts requiring non-traditional SCA services. For instance, contractors providing personnel to staff a call center will often find that the WDs incorporated in their contracts do not include a labor category to which the personnel can be readily mapped. Certain contracts for more complex, but SCA covered, ser- vices only further increase the subjectivity and complexity, particularly if the applicable WD has not evolved to keep pace with the services' increasing complexity. With the burden of selecting the appropri- ate labor category resting squarely on contractors, selecting the “wrong” labor category or classification level within a labor category (i.e.,General Clerk I versus General Clerk II) can result in a costly back pay situation for the contractor. This problem can become even more complicated if a contractor is performing under a fixed-price perfor- mance-based contract or similar contract where it is common for a contractor to cross-train its personnel to be able perform services covered by multiple labor categories or multiple classifications within a labor category. It is not unusual for such fixed-price contracts not to require the contractor to track hours spent by SCA-covered personnel on specific tasks or time spent performing a particular work function or performing certain items. In fact, in some cases, the nature of the contractor performance model and/or existing business systems may prevent the recording of time spent by SCA personnel performing specific tasks or items of performance under the contract. Instead, contractors track the total time SCA person- nel spend working on the SCA contract. Nevertheless, if a contractor's SCA-covered personnel perform work in multiple labor categories, it is the contractor's obligation to segregate hours worked in each labor category in its records and pay SCA covered personnel at the appropriate labor category rate for the work performed under that labor category by the employee. If a contractor cannot segregate the time its SCA personnel spend within each SCA labor category in a workweek, then the contractor must pay these em- ployees for all SCA hours at the highest labor rate amongst the labor categories worked. Continued on page …………. Rice Business Report

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