Wage determinations go digital

Prevailing wage requirements in federal service contracts are to be published on the Wage Determinations OnLine website outside the Federal Register, while general wage determinations under the Davis-Bacon Act are to continue appearing in the FR but also, apparently, on www.wdol.gov.

Apart from its importance to people working on federal contracts, this is an interesting item from an administrative law perspective. Designating such an impermanent medium as a website as the official means of publication for important federal announcements seems likely to raise a whole group of new legal issues. For example, although it should presumably be possible to prove the date when each new announcement was posted, how would a party to a dispute prove that technical difficulties in reviewing the site had arisen on a particular day -- for example, during a contract negotiation? Since the WDOL site will only calculate a wage amount after the user answers a series of questions, how does a prospective party to a contract gather a full understanding of how each factor influences the wage determination? What legal issues will arise around the use of official online request forms for individual wage determinations when users decide to bypass the automated system? How long will the superseded announcements be archived separately on the site? Will the archive of superseded announcements reflect small, apparently non-substantive changes such as punctuation corrections? Will an online system be more or less accessible to lower-paid employees?....

....Maybe there are things to be said for the printed page?