HHS recently announced the federal poverty guidelines for 2015. Prior to the ACA, employers never had much reason to be concerned with the federal poverty guidelines. Beginning this month, large employers are subject to a pay or play penalty if they don’t provide affordable minimum value health plan coverage to ...
I recently saw this article summarizing a nationwide workplace class-action litigation report for 2014. The article notes that there were a total of 7,163 ERISA claims filed in 2014, but the more astounding number was the total settlement figure for ERISA class-action claims in 2014 – a massive $1.3 billion. As a basis for ...
Self-directed brokerage accounts (“SDBAs”) have been offered in retirement plans for years, and are grounded in the principal that some participants are sophisticated enough to manage their account’s investments and outgain a plan’s designated investment alternatives. However, the Department of Labor has been ...
If your 401(k) plan is continuing to have problems passing the ADP test, you should seriously consider adding an automatic enrollment feature if your plan doesn’t already automatically enroll participants. A recent study by Vanguard found that participation rates more than double to 91% for plans with automatic enrollment ...
Tom Breitenbach
Just before Christmas and in the last hours of the 2014 assembly, the Ohio legislature quietly passed, and Governor Kasich signed into law, a provision enabling non-governmental employers to amend their 401(k) or 403(b) plans to provide for automatic enrollment and withholding of employee wages. What’s the big deal ...
The Departments of Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Resources have been busy lately in the field of excepted benefits, which have the luxury of avoiding HIPAA requirements and the ACA market reforms. On October 1, 2014, the Departments issued final regulations making limited scope vision and dental benefits easier to ...