Anonymised, illustrative composite. A BC property management firm had a clearance letter on file for every one of its 14 active vendor contracts. Every letter had been valid the day it was collected. Nobody had checked whether any of them still were.
At a glance
Every vendor contract in the portfolio had started the same, correct way: a clearance letter collected before work began, confirming the vendor was registered and in good standing with WorkSafeBC. For a short-term contract, that single check is close to sufficient — the work is done and invoiced before the letter has much chance to go stale. For a season-long snow-removal contract running from November through March, a letter dated the previous fall says nothing at all about February.
The other 13 vendor contracts in the portfolio were mostly shorter-term or project-based — a glazing repair completed in a matter of days, a waste-hauling contract renewed and re-checked annually — where a single clearance check at signing genuinely covered the exposure. The snow-removal contract stood out precisely because it did not fit that pattern: five months of active work under one clearance letter obtained on day one.
WorkSafeBC is explicit about why the letter matters and what it has to actually confirm: “if you hire a registered subcontractor who is not making required payments to WorkSafeBC, you could be liable for insurance premiums relating to the work or service they provided to you.” The clearance letter exists specifically to protect the hiring business from that exposure — but only if it confirms your subcontractor was “active and in good standing” for the entire contract period and is addressed specifically to the hiring company. A letter collected once, at signing, satisfies that wording for exactly one date. It does not, and was never designed to, speak to any date after it.
A portfolio-wide audit — prompted by nothing more than routine review, not an incident — checked all 14 active vendor contracts against current WorkSafeBC status rather than the letters already on file. One vendor, the snow-removal contractor covering three of the portfolio’s sites, had let its coverage lapse roughly six weeks before the audit caught it. That is 1 of 14 contracts, about 7% of the portfolio, running with a clearance that was current on paper and dead in practice.
The other 13 checked out cleanly against current status, which is itself worth noting: the process the firm had been running was not broken across the board, it had one specific structural gap — the one contract type where a single point-in-time check was never going to be enough. Fixing the process meant identifying which contracts had that shape, not overhauling how every vendor was checked.
The exposure WorkSafeBC describes travels with the calendar, not with the signature date on a letter. A property manager who checks once, at contract signing, has satisfied the letter of a good practice while missing the actual protection it is meant to provide on any contract that runs longer than the letter stays current. The liability risk is not that a vendor was never cleared — it is that clearance status is a moving target across a multi-month contract, and a single point-in-time check cannot track a moving target.
That exposure has a statutory basis, not just WorkSafeBC guidance: under the Workers Compensation Act, s. 258(1), both the hiring firm and its contractor are liable for the WorkSafeBC assessment on the work, and the Board may collect it “from either of them, or partly from each” — which is exactly why a lapsed clearance letter is the hiring firm’s own exposure, not only the vendor’s problem.
The lapsed vendor’s coverage was reinstated within days of being flagged, before any claim arose from the gap. The firm moved from checking clearance once at signing to re-verifying every active vendor contract on a recurring basis, folded into the same portfolio compliance calendar used to track life-safety testing. See how that same calendar caught a different portfolio-wide gap and how experience rating and premiums work.
For how firms are tracking subcontractor insurance and clearance status on a recurring basis, see tracking subcontractor insurance across a portfolio.
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