Should employees be allowed to use their own smart phones, tablets and laptop computers at the office? What type of guidelines or restrictions should there be, especially concerning utilization of company resources and transmission of information from/to these personal mobile devices? How much remot...

The American Payroll Association (APA) joined 60 other organizations in a letter formally objecting to new employer reporting requirements being considered by Congress. Dated June 9, 2015, the letter was delivered by the Strategic Services on Unemployment & Workers’ Compensation (UWC) to the Cha...

Part 1 introduced some of the challenges of the reporting requirements. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires employers to report information about the offer of health insurance coverage to their employees. Some Applicable Large Employers (ALEs) — defined as those with more than 50 full-time equiv...

The employer reporting requirements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) continue to challenge and confuse many of those who must comply.  The law empowers the IRS to verify and enforce that large employers have offered their employees affordable health insurance plans with at least minimal essential co...

One of the few remaining Affordable Care Act (ACA) requirements is a 40 percent excise tax on employer-sponsored health insurance coverage that exceeds specified threshold amounts. Also known as the Cadillac tax, it becomes effective in 2018 and is expected to be a major source of revenue. As a fol...

Recently, North Dakota became the latest state to sign up for RIDE (Records and Information from DMVs for E-Verify), joining Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi and Nebraska. RIDE is an ongoing E-Verify initiative that links E-Verify with participating state driver licensing agencies in conjunction wi...

There’s no argument that data drives your business.  If you were to share a diagram of the numerous systems your data is entered, housed and retrieved, would it look clean and precise or more like maze with no exit in sight?  Numerous interfaces make data collection time-consuming, difficult to coll...

While we already knew there would be penalties for failing to file IRS forms 1094 and 1095, the recently enacted Trade Preferences Extension Act of 2015 revised Section 6721(a)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code, providing penalty increases, making it more painful should an employer fail to file in a t...

Professional sports teams are masters of talent management.  They know how to select the right players for each position, how to evaluate their performance, how to get the most out every player’s strengths and how to improve on their weaknesses.  They keep their players engaged and focused on a sing...

Mergers and acquisitions are important to the business world, leading to company growth, venturing into a new field, getting that much needed technology or even reducing the competition.During the process, the organization may gain a larger presence in their field, increase profits and/or efficienci...

You remember the question from the Wendy’s commercial in the 80’s, don’t you?  Where’s the beef?  It has been stuck in our head for decades.  Now that the deadline for the ACA IRS reporting is looming, everyone seems to be asking “Where’s the process?”  It may or may not have occurred to the IRS tha...

The wait is over.  On June 25, 2014, the Supreme Court released its opinion on the Affordable Care Act’s premium tax subsidies.  At issue in the case of King vs. Burwell, was whether subsidies should be provided only for exchanges available in states “established by the State” or if credits should a...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) employer mandates and deadlines may not be as severe and scary as the famous haywire robot test scene in RoboCop, but aspects of the law are putting plenty of fear into those who have been paying attention to its implementation requirements. Repercussions can be much wo...

Few people know what the acronym COBRA actually stands for, but most know basically what it does.  From Wikipedia:  The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (or COBRA) is a law passed by the U.S. Congress on a reconciliation basis and signed by President Ronald Reagan that, among o...

The majority of today’s workforce is already using mobile technology, as close to 78 percent of American adults are regularly operating some kind of mobile device to learn, have fun and get things done. Instant access to information provides the capability to access and manage work-related tasks fro...

Most good employers want to provide a strong benefit package, and they want to do it in a way that complies with legal requirements. But the increasingly complex nature of benefits – especially since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – is making that more difficult. Even an employe...

January 31, 2016 seems so far away, doesn’t it? Yet the very preparation for that day should have begun no later than January 1, 2015. Regulations from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) went into effect on this date that would require marketplaces, issuers and providers of insurance, as well as Applicab...

Employee wellness is much more than a workplace buzz phrase. Companies have been discovering the multiple advantages of helping their employees take important steps toward maintaining optimum physical and mental health. As the programs have become more popular, governmental oversight has been sought...

In late 1988, Congress passed TAMRA (Technical and Miscellaneous Revenue Act of 1988) which provided guidelines for judging an employer’s COBRA compliance. By meeting the TAMRA guidelines beforehand, an employer stands a strong chance of being judged in a favorable light by the IRS, thus potentially...

Many employers offer Dependent Care in conjunction with their Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) to help employees save money on dependent care expenses.  Contributions to the Dependent Care account are made with pre-tax dollars, resulting in paying fewer taxes, increasing take-home pay and savin...

The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) requires that former employees be able to continue participating in the company’s health insurance coverage for a specific length of time. Some employers may think their obligations end when the employee leaves, but believing this may be as...

It the not so distant past, this sounded like science fiction:  use your fingerprint or retina to gain access to the super computer that rules the world!  But over the last decade or so, biometrics has become the must-have technology of employers wanting better workforce management. From adoption t...

In Part 1, we reviewed the far reaching affects the ACA has had on numerous laws, requiring changes to procedures and compliance programs.  Here we will review the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). FLSA The FLSA law was passed in 1938 to protect both a worker’s pay and working hours.  There are thr...

Part 1 It is no secret that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is burdensome and complex.  Employers, insurance brokers, vendors and anyone else who provides or services any insurance product, funds an insurance product or needs one has been effected either positively or negatively by this law.  It’s be...

High HCM demand Employers that utilize cloud-based human capital management (HCM) solutions quickly experience faster processing and reduced support demands while benefiting from anywhere, anytime accessibility through desktop, laptop or mobile devices.  Comprehensive HCM solutions are rapidly repl...