An ENR Top 100 contractor found 142 missing completed operations endorsements in 30 days

At a glance

Nobody read the endorsement pages. In its first 30 days on Pikorua Security, the contractor found 142 subcontractors whose additional insured coverage ended the day their work did, put every one of them on a payment hold through Procore and CMiC, and cut the time to resolve a deficiency with a subcontractor's insurance agent from 28 days to 4.2.

The challenge

The contractor's subcontract carries a three-tier insurance exhibit: a standard trade exhibit, a high-hazard exhibit for roofing, structural steel, crane and excavation work, and a design-assist exhibit that adds professional liability. Every tier requires additional insured status for ongoing and completed operations, primary and non-contributory wording, waivers of subrogation on general liability, auto and workers compensation, and an insurer rated A- VII or better by AM Best. On paper the requirements were strong. In practice they were checked by about 40 project administrators, each with their own spreadsheet, and the check consisted of matching dates and limits on the ACORD 25 front page.

The ACORD 25 cannot tell you which additional insured form sits behind it. The ADDL INSD column is a single letter. A subcontractor whose policy carries CG 20 10 04 13 alone shows a Y in that column, exactly like a subcontractor who also carries CG 20 37 04 13. The first form covers the contractor while the work is ongoing. Only the second covers it after the work is complete, which is when most construction defect and water intrusion claims arrive.

That gap surfaced in 2025, when a water intrusion claim came in on a medical office building eight months after turnover. The contractor tendered the claim to the roofing subcontractor's carrier, and the carrier declined: the roofer's policy carried only the ongoing operations form. The contractor's own general liability program and its self-insured retention absorbed the defense. Afterward the VP of Risk Management asked a simple question: how many other subcontractors look like that roofer? Nobody could answer it without opening roughly 4,600 PDFs by hand.

The second problem was speed. When a project administrator did catch a deficiency, the fix ran through email between the PM, the subcontractor's office manager and the subcontractor's retail insurance agent. The contractor measured the average at 28 days from deficiency to corrected certificate, and subcontractors routinely worked and billed the whole time.

What changed

Pikorua Security's risk engineering team loaded the three exhibits into the contract rule builder in the first week: 31 rules per tier, including form-level checks for CG 20 10 plus CG 20 37 (or CG 20 38 on projects where the owner sits in the chain), CG 20 01 for primary and non-contributory wording, CG 24 04 and WC 00 03 13 for waivers, and edition rules that flag any form older than the 04 13 editions. Anything on the 11 85 edition is routed to the contractor's counsel rather than auto-approved, at counsel's request.

The vendor master came across from CMiC and active commitments came from Procore, so each subcontractor was matched to its project, its exhibit tier and its contract value without anyone retyping a name. Pikorua Security then parsed the backlog: 4,612 COI packets, including every attached endorsement page, in 11 days. Each packet took about 15 seconds to read. The rest of the time went to the contractor's risk team confirming the edge cases the parser routed to them, such as manuscript action-over exclusions on New York projects.

Deficiency notices went out automatically to the subcontractor and its retail insurance agent at the same time, listing the exact form missing, the edition the contract requires and the subcontract clause that requires it. Agents uploaded corrected endorsements through a zero-login link with no account to create. Renewals now run on a 60, 30, 15 and 0 day cadence without a PM touching them.

Enforcement moved into the systems the contractor already runs. A deficient or expired subcontractor gets a hold on its pay application in Procore and an AP payment hold on the vendor in CMiC. The hold releases automatically when the corrected endorsement verifies, so the project accountant never has to remember to lift it.

Results

Within 30 days the contractor had a defensible answer to the VP's question: 142 subcontractors carried additional insured coverage for ongoing operations only. Another 97 had no waiver of subrogation on workers compensation, and 38 carried CG 21 39, which removes the contractual liability coverage the subcontract's indemnity clause depends on. All of them were on hold within the same week, and 131 of the 142 completed operations gaps were closed inside 45 days.

Average resolution with subcontractors' insurance agents dropped from 28 days to 4.2 days, because the agent now receives a specific checklist instead of a forwarded email chain. Project teams estimate 6,400 administrative hours a year returned to PMs and project administrators across the portfolio.

Since go-live, the contractor has tendered three claims to subcontractor carriers using Pikorua Security audit packets: the certificate, every endorsement page, the governing exhibit and a time-stamped verification log. All three tenders were accepted. That is now the number the risk committee reports to the board each quarter.