You show a photo with one piece of paper and claim there was a ton, so you don't want to pay the person that originally built the retaining wall. Failing to pay a contractor will get a lien placed on your property. No big deal unless you want to sell or even just refinance. Then you can't move forward until the lien holder has been satisfied.

Not worried with the payment as much as structural integrity. I have no clue. Is this a structural issue or not?

It doesn't look like it would have caused structural failure, but again, you only show one piece of paper!

I’ve got 20 photos. Didn’t think I’d need to share them all. Thanks for the input though. Very helpful! Sounds like paper in a retainer wall is no big deal then.

It's not that it's no big deal, but I could see no evidence of it causing a failure. Most importantly, you are having the wall removed and replaced.

You had a CMU wall. Sometimes, you want to fill a cell on the top course of CMU to say hold an anchor that is just for the cap on a wall. So instead of having the grout fill fall all the way down the wall inside cells that meet up vertically, contractors will stick whatever they can find to stop the grout from falling, so it only fills the top course cell.

Now if there was rebar in a cell that had to be grout filled, that is a different story. But I only see maybe 2 courses of CMU, and you are removing it all anyway, so I don't think there is anything to worry about with the other contractor.

Thanks all for the input. We aren’t removing the entire wall. Half of it was torn down since the backyard team said it wasnt deep enough to support the hill as a retainer wall. The remaining half of the original wall is still in place, supporting a smaller side of the hill. When they removed half of it, there was rebar throughout.