The city just made it a lot easier to check who you're bidding against — and who you might be subcontracting to.

On September 4, City Comptroller Brad Lander's office released the 2026 edition of the Employer Violations Dashboard, a public database tracking companies cited for breaking labor law in New York City. It's not new — this is an update to a tool the Comptroller's office has run for a few years — but the 2026 edition adds fresh violation data, and it's worth a fresh look because of how it gets used downstream.

Here's why you should care even if your own paperwork is clean. City agencies increasingly check this kind of record before awarding contracts, and so do plenty of GCs doing their own due diligence on subs. If a plumbing sub you're about to bring onto a public job has wage theft findings sitting in that dashboard, that's now a Google search away from the agency's contracting office — and from your competitor, who will absolutely mention it.

The dashboard pulls together violations from multiple enforcement sources: prevailing wage findings, safe and sick leave violations, fair workweek citations, and other labor law actions the city tracks. It's organized by employer name, so a contractor with citations under one entity can't easily hide behind a slightly different corporate name on the next bid — assuming the enforcement data catches the connection, which isn't guaranteed.

What to do about it: if you're prequalifying subs for public work, run their name through the dashboard before you sign anything, not after an agency flags it. If you've got open violations sitting on your own record, resolve them before your next bid — a dashboard like this makes stale paperwork a lot more visible than it used to be.

This is a transparency tool, not a new law — it doesn't change what's illegal, only what's easy to find. But on a public job, what's easy to find is what gets checked.