HeldBack checked 200 filings for one contractor and reported zero, because none of them can be judged yet

A subcontractor finishes a school gym in 2023, sends the final invoice, and never sees the last five percent of the money. Nobody calls to explain. On a Washington public works job that five percent is retainage, held by the awarding agency, and the agency is barred by law from paying it out until an approved Affidavit of Wages Paid is on file. If a firm two tiers above never filed, the money stops for everyone below it.

Washington publishes both halves of that paperwork openly: the Statement of Intent every contractor files before work, and the Affidavit filed after. HeldBack takes a company name or a nine digit UBI, fetches that company's Intents, asks the Affidavit file about those specific Intent IDs, and reports the jobs with nothing filed against them. Free, and it asks for no account.

Watch the HeldBack, Retainage stays frozen until the Affidavit clears demo

Most of the work is deciding what to throw away

A job that started six months ago has no Affidavit because the work is not finished. Calling that frozen money is wrong, and it is wrong on exactly the contracts a contractor remembers best, which is the fastest way to lose someone who opened the page wondering whether this is a scam. So anything that started inside 24 months is dropped.

Anything older than 48 months goes too. Under RCW 63.30.040(4) a debt of a business is presumed abandoned three years after the obligation to pay arises, so a 2004 bridge job has nothing waiting at the agency to release, whatever the comparison says.

Contracts at or under $5,000 are dropped as well. Washington folds the Affidavit into a combined form at that size, so it never appears separately, and every one of those rows would be a false positive by construction.

Three real lookups, run against the live check:

The last row is the point. Two hundred filings, every one too recent, too old or too small to judge, so the honest output is that nothing was checked. A tool that headlined 200 contracts there would be lying at volume.

The dataset has a field that will ruin you

Two columns in the Intent file both look like the contract value. One of them is the whole project, shared by every company on the site: in one file of these records, 18 different firms all report the same $34,025,597 for a single Spokane airport job. HeldBack always applies the five percent cap to the filer's own contract amount. The other field would tell a sub owed three thousand dollars that he has thirty four million locked up.

HeldBack does not file the Affidavit. That goes through your own L&I account, and anyone promising otherwise is selling something they cannot deliver. The $59 packet prepares one contract within two business days: the record sheet with every line sourced to the published file, the affidavit status letter naming which approval is missing, the awarding agency's public works contact, the release request letter, and who filed above you on the job. $15 a month re-runs the comparison and emails only when something new is blocked.

Run a company through the free check: HeldBack

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