How do I fix a state-specific form that isn't being assigned?

Last updated: August 7, 2026

A form scoped to a state that never shows up on a placement is almost always a stored-address problem or an operator problem. This walks through both, and through the inverse failure — the form landing on someone who shouldn't get it.

What you're seeing

The form is built, the policy is scoped to a state, the placement gets created — and the form never appears. Nothing errors. There's no failed job to look at and no warning on the placement.

That silence is the clue. Form assignment is rule evaluation over the facts already stored on the placement. There's no step that resolves an address into a state along the way, so there's nothing to fail — a rule that doesn't match produces no output at all.

Check the employee's stored address

State rules read the address facts on the records tied to the placement: employee.address.state, employer.address.state, and job.address.state. For USA and Canada, the state is stored as a two-letter abbreviation — VA, CO — no matter how it was typed in. Write your rule values as abbreviations to match.

Now open the employee and look at the address on the record. An Onboarded address is all-or-nothing: street, city, state, and country have to be present together for the address to save. (zip and secondary are optional.) There is no partial address — a record either carries a complete one or an entirely empty one.

When the address is empty, employee.address.state isn't blank. It's undefined. There's nothing for the rule to compare against.

Two common ways a record ends up with no address at all:

  • Someone built a test employee and entered a city and state only, to move faster. Nothing saved. Every state rule then fails silently.

  • An integration sent a partial address. Same result.

An employee filling out a form can't create this state — the address input in the form experience is a Google Places autocomplete, which returns complete components. Partial addresses arrive from integrations and manual setup.

[SCREENSHOT: employee record with an empty Address field alongside one with a complete address]

Check the operator on your rule

An undefined fact doesn't make every rule false. Positive operators return false, but negative operators return true — so a rule phrased as "state is not in [CA, NY]" matches an employee with no address, and the form gets assigned to someone who shouldn't have it. Nothing flags it.

Operator

Result when the fact is undefined

is

false

is in

false

contains

false

is not

true

is not in

true

does not contain

true

Take an account that scopes its state law-poster forms to Virginia and Colorado with employee.address.state is in VA, CO. Any employee without a stored address falls out — that's the missing-form symptom. Flip the same policy to employee.address.state is not in CA, NY and those same employees now match, and receive a form scoped for states they may have nothing to do with.

If a rule has to use a negative operator, pair it with a second condition requiring the address to exist. Where you can, scope the policy positively by listing the states you want instead.

Verify

Open or create a placement for an employee whose address is complete and sits in one of your scoped states. The form appears on the placement without any further action.

If it still doesn't appear, check these in order:

  • The state value in your rule is the two-letter abbreviation (VA, not Virginia).

  • You're pointed at the fact you meant. employee.address.state is where the employee lives; job.address.state and employer.address.state come from different records and can disagree.

  • The form doesn't carry an attribute scope that's dropping it. A form scoped to a placement attribute is removed when that attribute is null on the employee, even when the policy rule matches cleanly.

  • The policy is active and covers the placement.

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