Can Missouri Employers Separate Employees Payroll Between Carpentry and Sales?

We were recently asked this workers compensation question by an employer located in the State of Missouri. This employer owns a small corporation where he is the only corporate officer and has only one employee who spends a small amount of his actual time performing carpentry duties and the rest in sales. The workers comp auditor told him he could not split or divide payroll between the two class codes representing these work processes.

To begin, Missouri is a NCCI state and NCCI rules are very specific with regards this situation. You see, under certain circumstances, you are allowed to separate payroll into different classifications, however when it involves the standard exception classes of clerical and outside sales you have to be careful. If an employee performs duties under the basic classification code, in this question the basic code would be that of carpentry,  and also performs duties in the standard exception classes, then their entire payroll is to be assigned to the highest rated class code that represents any part of the employees work. And for this situation that would be carpentry.

Lesson Learned: You must be careful when it comes to separation of payroll issues and workers compensation. Separation of payroll is only allowed under certain circumstances. A mistake here could cost you thousands of dollars in additional workers compensation premium at audit time!

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