Michael Ross

Research lead, PEO & workers' compensation

Michael verifies every PEO, metro, industry and class-code field on PEO Signal against the issuing state agency or the NCCI Scopes manual before it is published.

Michael owns the US surfaces on PEO Signal: the state PEO pages, the metro pages beneath them, the industry verticals, and the NCCI class-code register. For each field he opens the issuing source directly — the state unemployment-insurance agency's taxable-wage-base notice, the state labour department's minimum-wage schedule, the state workers'-compensation authority's filed loss costs — records the value, the exact source URL, and the date he read it, then sets the next review date from that dataset's publication cadence.

Before PEO Signal he worked on multi-state payroll compliance for a mid-market PEO broker, where the recurring failure mode was a client quoted on a wage base that had already been superseded. That is why every number here carries its own verified-on date instead of one page-level timestamp: a state page is only as fresh as its stalest field.

He also maintains the class-code work: scope language, hazard group, the misclassification patterns auditors flag most often, and how the premium payroll base is assembled. Rates are deliberately excluded from those pages because rates are filed per state and go stale faster than we can verify them.

How every field is sourced and re-checked is documented in our methodology.