News

Here’s a head-scratcher: Why would people buy a health insurance policy that doesn’t cover a number of basic medical services and gets them fined by the federal government? It’s cheaper that way, insist many of the people who are opting to purchase short-term health plans that do not meet the standards for insurance specified by […]

Offering a competitive benefits package can bring many challenges, with increasing costs, changing health care regulations, and an increasingly diverse workforce among them. More employers are turning to voluntary benefits as an option to meet those challenges, but which benefit should they offer? The criteria companies use for choosing voluntary benefits need not differ much from […]

The District Court for the Southern District of New York recently turned down a motion to dismiss from the national restaurant chain Dave & Buster’s in a case where a group of employees sued the company for allegedly cutting employee hours to less than 30 hours/week to avoid offering health insurance under the Affordable Care […]

By David Katz “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. The great Oz has spoken.” Invoking scenes from the Wizard of Oz, U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez and the Department of Labor unveiled last week the finished product of its highly-anticipated union “persuader” rule, requiring employers and their advisers to report […]

6 tips for conducting exit interviews. Exit interviews may be an untapped source of information for benefit managers to analyze and make changes to programs that may be underperforming or in need of revamping to be better used. Listening A little more than 60% of employers say they heed employees’ parting words from exit interviews, […]

United Healthcare, the nation’s largest health insurer, has a novel idea to cut costs: Give people more stuff for free. The company has set up a subsidiary firm, Harken Health, that gives its members access to unlimited primary care services. Beyond visits to the doctor’s office, members have access to a 24-hour help line, a […]

Negotiating the compliance landscape for controlled and affiliated service groups was always a difficult task for benefit advisers and their corporate clients. Now the Affordable Care Act has made it even more challenging.   Although large corporations are accustomed to intricate benefit rules, including those pertaining to the shared responsibilities of related businesses, the ACA […]

In Announcement 2015-19, issued on July 21, 2015, the Internal Revenue Service said it was eliminating the staggered five-year determination letter remedial amendment cycles for individually designed tax-qualified retirement plans effective Jan. 1, 2017. Employers depend on these determination letters to ensure both their defined benefit and defined contribution plans remain in compliance with the […]

New Vermont legislation that requires employers to provide paid sick leave will have the greatest impact on smaller employers that don’t currently offer a comparable benefit and employers doing business in multiple states. Under H.187 passed by the Vermont legislature in February, employers must provide employees in the Green Mountain State at least 24 hours […]

In more than 20 years working in human resources, there is one thing I’ve learned above everything else: HR is incredibly complex. For starters, there are dozens of state and federal agencies tasked with enforcing hundreds of employment-related laws that organizations must follow. Add to this that businesses are also responsible for, at a minimum, […]