7 in 10 Contractor COIs Are Non-Compliant. You'll Carry the Risk.

Effectively yes. If you engage a contractor working on your site or on your behalf, you can be held liable when they cause harm and they are uninsured. The claim travels up: the injured party sues the contractor, the contractor has no coverage, the claim attaches to whoever has insurance - usually you. Courts have repeatedly held principals to a duty of care to verify insurance before engagement and to monitor it continuously.

Certificate Holder simply means you receive a copy of the certificate - it gives you no rights under the policy. To be covered by the contractor's policy you must be named as an Additional Insured, evidenced by a separate endorsement form attached to the COI (CG 20 10 for ongoing operations and CG 20 37 for completed operations, in most cases). Many COIs we see in audits list the right entity as Certificate Holder but include no Additional Insured endorsement form at all. That gap is the single most common COI failure.

At a minimum: general / public liability, workers' compensation (or employer's liability), commercial auto where applicable, professional indemnity for design or advisory work, the relevant Additional Insured and Waiver of Subrogation endorsements, OSHA 10 or 30 cards for site contractors, trade certifications (CSCS, Gas Safe, NICEIC, EPA), W-9 or W-8 forms, I-9 or right-to-work documentation, background checks where the role requires, and site-specific method statements / risk assessments.

Sole-proprietor subcontractors with no employees can legally hold a workers' comp exemption. The risk is that the exemption form is older than 12 months, refers to the wrong entity, or covers a state different from where the work is being done. ExpiryEdge stores the exemption as a separate document type with its own expiry date and state metadata, so the loophole closes rather than opens.

Yes - and this is the silent failure mode behind most "we had the certificate" claims. Most policies allow mid-term cancellation, and the carrier may or may not notify you depending on the endorsement language. ExpiryEdge runs continuous status checks against expiry dates and supports notice-of-cancellation endorsements (CG 24 04 / equivalents) so the policy status is monitored beyond the certificate.

Yes. For each contractor document you choose who gets the alert: your team, the contractor, or both. Default cadence is 60 and 30 days before expiry, with an escalation to your team if the contractor has not responded by 14 days.

ISNetworld, Avetta, Veriforce, and TrustLayer are designed for enterprise principals with thousands of subs and large risk budgets - typical pricing $10–60k per year plus per-contractor fees. ExpiryEdge fits the 5 to 500 contractor bracket those tools are too expensive for, with the same core capabilities (document collection, validation, expiry tracking, audit trail) and flat-rate pricing. See our Avetta vs ISNetworld comparison for full context.