Lyndsey is the Chair of the Firm's Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Practice Group. One aspect of Lyndsey’s practice involves counseling employers with respect to the development of employee benefit strategies to ...
Unless an exception applies, all ERISA-covered benefit plans have to file an annual Form 5500 each year with the DOL and IRS (filed through the DOL’s website). Plan sponsors have the ability to combine their welfare plan filings (e.g., medical, dental, vision, disability, life, etc.) into a single Form 5500. Filing a single form can cut down ...
For the third year in a row, the IRS adjusted the affordability percentage used for the shared responsibility penalties down. The IRS recently announced that the affordability percentage for 2024 will be 8.39%. This is down from 9.12% in 2023. For employers this means that if you set your employee premium costs last year right at the ...
Errors in retirement plans happen even to the most well-intentioned plan sponsors. Several decades ago, the IRS published the first version of the Employee Plans Compliance Resolution Program (EPCRS), which outlines procedures by which plan sponsors can correct errors in their qualified retirement plans. Some of these errors could be ...
By: Lyndsey Barnett and Tommy Rogers*
As you may be aware, Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) fidelity bonds and fiduciary liability insurance are not the same. Both serve to mitigate risk for fiduciaries, and are critical aspects of an employee benefits plan. The difference between the two lies in the risks that they cover. Are you ...
Lyndsey Barnett and Ihsan Walker
SECURE 2.0 has changed the game again by now allowing employers to save time and money by eliminating certain notices to be sent to unenrolled employees. In the past sponsors were required to send voluminous documents disclosing their retirement and welfare benefits plans to both enrolled and unenrolled ...
By: Lyndsey Barnett and Mikayla Howard*
The next installment of our updates on SECURE 2.0 is on another new in-service withdrawal option. SECURE 2.0 allows plan sponsors of defined contribution plans to amend their plans to allow plan participants who are victims of domestic abuse to make penalty-free early withdrawals from their retirement ...
By: Lyndsey Barnett and Michaela Taylor*
Catch-up eligible individuals enrolled in an employer-sponsored retirement plan have new changes coming their way under Secure 2.0. Beginning in 2024, individuals age 50 or older by the end of the calendar year in which the plan year ends, that made over $145,000 in wages in the previous year with the same ...
By: Lyndsey Barnett and Michaela Taylor*
As we have mentioned in previous insights, SECURE 2.0 has provided several opportunities for plan administrators to assist participants in tackling emergency expenses. Two of these provisions updated the administration of hardship withdrawals to plan participants.
Previously, the IRS permitted ...
At the end of 2022, Congress passed SECURE 2.0. This legislation builds on the original SECURE Act (Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act) of 2019 that expanded access to retirement accounts, promoted participation, and preserved savings. This legislation adds benefits to both retirement plan sponsors and their ...
In law school, students flocked to any meeting that offered free pizza. Free pizza got me roped into being the secretary of the environmental law club in law school, which was an area I had no knowledge or real interest in. But they served pizza at the meetings and I was broke, so I attended! It always amazes me that even at our law firm, people show up ...
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By: Lyndsey Barnett and Michaela Taylor*
As we have mentioned in previous insights, the SECURE 2.0 Act, which was passed in December, has ushered in new ways for employers to assist their employees in building savings for the future. Two of these optional provisions specifically address expenses for emergencies.
Last year, the Consumer ...
By: Lyndsey Barnett and Michaela Taylor*
Next up on our updates on SECURE 2.0 is Section 111 which addresses rising student loan debt. According to an article published by the Education Data Initiative last October, student loan debt totals $1.745 trillion. While SECURE 2.0 contains many new changes impacting benefit plans, this provision may ...
By: Lyndsey Barnett and Michaela Taylor*
On December 23, the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and the Treasury (the “Departments”), issued a new FAQ granting flexibility for plans and issuers ahead of the December 27th Prescription Drug Data Collection (RxDC) reporting deadline.
Recognizing the significant ...
The SECURE Act, which was enacted in 2019, made several changes impacting required minimum distributions that impacts virtually all retirement plans. The most commonly known change was the change in the required beginning date from 70 ½ to age 72. It also changed the distribution on death rules eliminating the option to pay over the ...
Many employers this time of year are finding out that they are going to be receiving a premium increase for their health plans. As someone who sits on our firm’s health care committee, I can attest that sometimes that increase can feel like a gut punch when you receive it. Once employers negotiate it or shop their plan to get that final rate, the next ...
Lyndsey Barnett and Cassidy Zang*
McDonald’s recently notified a Florida federal court that a class-wide settlement was reached and ready for approval in the COBRA suit brought against them. This settlement is the result of an action filed in December 2020 by a former employee who alleged that the corporation was sending former employees ...
By: Lyndsey Barnett and Michaela Taylor*
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has handed down their latest action against a medical center in Oklahoma for violations of HIPAA’s privacy, security, and breach notification rules. The health center will now pay $875,000 in fines to resolve a ...
By: Lyndsey Barnett and Michaela Taylor*
On June 21, 2022, the Sixth Circuit in Smith v. CommonSpirit Health provided updated guidance for plan sponsors in excessive 401(k) fee complaint cases. In their opinion, which affirmed a September 2021 decision from the Eastern District of Kentucky, the court held that whether an ERISA excessive fee claim ...
As a reminder, all defined contribution plans that are on a pre-approved document, including 401(k) and profit sharing plans, must be restated every 6 years. This restatement is necessary even if you have made no design changes to your plan. The current restatement cycle for defined contribution plans opened on August 1, 2020 and ends on July 31 ...
We frequently receive questions from clients about what to do when an employee misses the window to enroll their new spouse or child. Often the employee has a compelling reason and the employer wants to help, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be calling me, they would just deny the enrollment as late. In the past few months, I have received a few ...
COVID rules are confusing and ever-changing. The CDC changes its mind so frequently on who and how to quarantine that the rules may change twice during your quarantine period and we are still waiting (as of the moment I am writing this at least) to see whether the Supreme Court is going to uphold the law on vaccine mandates (you can learn more about ...
Since the start of the pandemic, there has been a swell of guidance that permits employers to revise their Section 125 plans (a/k/a Cafeteria Plans) to provide various relief to plan participants. We previously blogged in detail about these changes that were permitted under the Coronavirus Aid Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act)
This week the DOL, IRS and HHS jointly issued FAQs regarding the rules surrounding when an employer can charge an unvaccinated worker more in its health plan. This guidance doesn’t provide new information, but only confirms what most practitioners (including those at Graydon) have been advising – to charge a surcharge you must follow the ...
If you are a large employer required to provide health plan coverage to avoid the employer mandate shared responsibility penalties, it is prudent to reevaluate your health plan contribution structure each year before open enrollment to ensure that your plan is still “affordable.” Since the passage of the ACA, it is no longer a strategy to set ...
Last week Delta airlines announced it was going to begin charging employees enrolled in its health plan an extra $200 per month if they were not fully vaccinated. Since that story made the news, we have received numerous inquiries from clients as to whether they could also charge employees more to be in their health plan. The simple answer is yes, but ...
By: Lyndsey Barnett and Liam McMillin
The end of summer is (sadly) just around the corner. I know, it feels like we just finally got out of the house for the first time a week ago, but before we know it, the kids will be back in school, the days will start getting shorter, and the leaves will be changing colors.
As the summer ends, so do the COBRA premium ...
This morning the DOL issued the much anticipated guidance on the COBRA subsidies provided for in the American Rescue Plan Act (“ARPA”). There were not many surprises, but to see what we learned, check out this post. To see what we already knew, check out our prior post.
The DOL also issued the model notices that Congress mandated them to issue as ...
One year ago today, you couldn’t have found a face mask in my house. Today, we have an entire drawer in our kitchen dedicated to masks. And while the amount I have spent on gas and entertainment is down considerably year over year, I have spent my fair share on Etsy and other sites on superhero masks for my 5 and 7 year old (whatever it takes to get them to ...
Last Spring, the DOL and IRS issued a Joint Rule that extended a number of participant deadlines under COBRA, HIPAA and ERISA. Under the Joint Rule, plan sponsors had to extend any of deadline that occurred on or after March 1, 2020 until the 60 days following the end of the National Emergency (referred to as the “Outbreak Period”). However ...
Last month, we wrote a post on the relief items for FSA participants added by the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 (“CAA”). The CAA provides a number of relief items for plan participants that employers may choose to implement for their health FSA and dependent care FSA plans. This relief includes the ability for an employer to offer an ...
2020 was a year of great uncertainty. Things were constantly changing and almost nothing was guaranteed to happen until it was actually happening. As the year was winding down, there were two things that were certain in my life each week. The first was that the UPS/FedEx truck would be making the truck down my long driveway and the second was I would get ...
Over the past 7 months, the various government agencies have provided numerous pieces of relief to both participants and plan sponsors by extending deadlines on various employee benefit plan obligations. However, one requirement where no relief has been granted is the requirement for employers to send Medicare Part D notices of creditable ...
On Friday, the IRS issued a Notice that extends the deadline for large employers (generally those with 50 or more full-time equivalent employees in the previous year) and self-insured group health plans to distribute Forms 1095-C to employees and plan participants. This guidance looks almost identical to the relief provided for the 2019 tax ...
If you are a large employer required to provide health plan coverage to avoid the shared responsibility penalties, it is prudent to reevaluate your contribution structure each year before open enrollment to ensure that your plan is still “affordable.” Most employers were diligent about calculating affordability in the first few years ...
In IRS Notice 2020-51, the IRS provides much anticipated guidance on the CARES Act provision waiving 2020 required minimum distributions (RMDs). Much of the guidance in the IRS Notice deals with the beyond the scenes nuts and bolts of how the RMD waiver and any repayments of RMDs taken earlier this year would work. But there are a number of items that ...
Last week, Graydon’s Lyndsey Barnett, Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation attorney partnered with VonLehman CPA & Advisory Firm and Joanna Berding, ERISA Attorney at Pension Corporation of America (PCA), as they discussed the numerous legal changes that have occurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the changes ...
While it may be too early to be thinking about next year for some and hard to think about anything but dealing with the pandemic, others are already knee deep in making health plan changes for 2021. For those already planning for next year, the IRS just announced the new 2021 contribution limits for a health savings account (“HSA”), as well as ...
Just moments after hanging up the phone with a client confirming for them that there has been no relief under Section 125 on mid-year changes that are not HIPAA special enrollment events , the IRS issues Notice 2020-29 and Notice 2020-33 providing guidance that makes the advice I gave 5 minutes before invalid. We are on the fastest freight train of ...
Have you ever experienced an employee attempting to enroll their spouse a month and a half after getting married or an employee attempting to enroll a newborn child 40 days after the birth? Normally, these enrollments would not be permitted given that the employee notified you outside of the 30-day HIPAA special enrollment window. Well along ...
Under the FMLA, an employer is required to continue an employee’s group health plan coverage at active employee rates during the length of the FMLA leave. Therefore, it came as no surprise that the DOL temporary regulations that were released yesterday on the Emergency Paid Sick Leave Act (“EPSLA”) and the Emergency Family Medical Leave ...
Almost all employers that sponsor a Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account Plan (DC FSA) provide for a run-out period in the plan. A run-out period is the period of time in the following plan year that DC FSA participants can submit reimbursements for expenses incurred in the prior year. Most DC FSA plans run on a calendar year and a very common ...
Many of us now find ourselves working from our home offices, the kitchen table or maybe even sitting in our cars in the garage to have quiet on a conference call while our kids, spouses, and/or pets are running around the house. Our new normal for the next several weeks is anything but normal for many employers and employees. I have yet to talk to a client ...
If you have fewer than 500 employees and provide health insurance, you need to read this post. This impacts even those small employers who are not otherwise subject to the FMLA. These new changes apply to all employers with fewer than 500 employees. This means even those companies that have fewer than 50 employees must comply with these new ...
We are in a time where everything is changing and changing quickly. If you would have told me a week ago that my children would be off school indefinitely, my husband and I would be working remotely and all our restaurants and bars would be closed to dining, I would have said you were crazy. Yet that is the situation that we are waking up to today. As a result ...
In 2018, the IRS began assessing employer shared responsibility penalties on large employers that failed to offer substantially all of their full-time employees minimum essential coverage. It also began issuing penalties to those large employers that failed to offer affordable, minimum value coverage to employees who then enrolled in ...
As you have likely seen by now, over the weekend President Trump signed the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Security Act (the “SECURE Act”) into legislation. This is the largest piece of legislation impacting retirement plans since the PPA was enacted in 2006. We will be addressing the impact of this legislation on your plan over a ...
Large employers must not only offer coverage to avoid the shared responsibility employer mandate penalties, but the cost of coverage must also be affordable. If you are a large employer required to provide health plan coverage to avoid the shared responsibility penalties, it is prudent to reevaluate your contribution structure each year ...
By Lyndsey Barnett and Laura Caty
Marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug. Period.
Until the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) removes marijuana from the classification of a Schedule I drug and unless marijuana is legalized under federal law, group health plans do not have the option of covering medical marijuana. According to the DEA, Schedule I drugs have a ...
While it may be early to be thinking about next year for some, others are already knee deep in making health plan changes for 2020. For those that like to get a jump on planning for next year, the IRS just announced the new 2020 contribution limits for a health savings account (“HSA”), as well as the 2020 minimum deductible and maximum ...
At a conference late last week, an IRS official announced that the IRS was working on guidance to answer the many questions that it has received after the issuance of the PLR last August approving a unique student loan repayment arrangement inside of a retirement plan. With student loan debt continuing to rise and be an issue for employees, more and ...
No. Your eyes are not playing tricks on you and there is not a typo in my title. HHS just announced that it is decreasing the annual limit on HIPAA violations for three of the four tiers of violations.
In 2009, Congress greatly increased the amount of penalties that HHS could assess for HIPAA violations in the HITECH Act. HITECH established four tiers ...
We frequently receive inquiries from clients asking us our opinion on whether the ACA will be struck down. We received these questions a lot in the first few years after the law was enacted and they have picked up again in the past year or so. I don’t have a crystal ball, so I am never inclined to give a very definitive answer (and sorry but you won’t get ...
Do you charge employees an increased premium in your health plan if they use tobacco? If so, do you know the requirements to be able to do so without violating HIPAA, the ADA, GINA or state law? While in most states a tobacco surcharge is permitted, the rules have become quite complex.
Among other requirements, in order for a tobacco surcharge to be ...
Or at least it is going to cost Dave & Buster’s about $7.425 million plus legal fees. When the ACA employer mandate first came out, there were many large companies in the news stating that they were going to cut employees’ hours to under 30 hours per week in order to avoid having to provide health plan coverage to those individuals. As an ERISA ...
If you are a large employer required to provide health plan coverage to avoid the shared responsibility penalties, it is prudent to reevaluate your contribution structure each year before open enrollment to ensure that your plan is still “affordable.” Most employers were diligent about calculating affordability in the first few years ...
You likely heard about the Anthem breach back in 2015. Given that 79 million individuals were impacted, it is likely that you or someone in your family was impacted by the breach. Well it took HHS several years, but they just announced the settlement with Anthem this week. Anthem has agreed to pay HHS $16 million and take substantial corrective ...
If you sponsor a self-insured group health plan, make sure you’ve set your calendar alerts for the annual PCORI fee (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute fee) for the 2017 plan year. As a reminder, the PCORI fee was put into place by the ACA to help fund the Patient Outcomes Research Institute and is based on the average number of covered ...
Co-authored by Lyndsey Barnett and Alex Mattingly
A Section 125 plan, commonly referred to as a cafeteria plan, provides employees with the option of purchasing employer-sponsored benefits on a pre-tax basis. These plans allow employees to pick between increased total compensation and contributing part of their compensation for the payment ...
Each summer as clients are going through the external audit for the Form 5500 for their 401(k) plans, we seem to receive the same call from clients. The call goes something like this: “Our auditors just discovered an error in the operation of our plan. They say that our plan document includes bonuses in the definition of compensation, but we have ...
The Tax Cuts & Jobs Act changed the way that certain IRS limits would be indexed. One of the items that was changed was how the HSA contribution limits would be calculated. The indexing change was effective when the Act was passed in December. However, since the HSA contribution limits were already announced for 2018, most people (including myself ...
According to a recent survey done by the Defined Contribution Institutional Investment Association, 60% of all defined contribution plans currently have an automatic enrollment feature. Automatic enrollment has a proven track record of improving plan participation and increasing savings rates among participants. But the reality is that ...
No plan administrator wants to find out that the protected health information of their plan participants may have been compromised. HIPAA violations and breaches can cause a lot of headaches for a plan administrator and for health plan participants. And if you are one of the unlucky ones that has had to deal with that issue, your first concern was ...
On January 22nd, Congress passed and President Trump signed a stopgap funding bill to reopen the government. Along with reopening the government, this bill also delayed the ACA’s Cadillac Tax for another 2 years so that it is not set to be effective until 2022. The 40% excise tax on high-value health plans was originally set to take effect in 2018. ...
While accountants and tax advisors are scrambling to figure out what steps, if any, their clients should be taking by year end due to the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, many of us in the benefits world are breathing a sigh of relief that some of the proposals relating to qualified retirement plans didn’t make it into the final Act. In a prior post
The IRS recently announced that it extending the deadline for large employers and self-insured group health plans to distribute their Forms 1095-C to employees and plan participants. The normal deadline to distribute Forms 1095-C is January 31st. This IRS announcement delays the deadline for distributing your 2017 forms until March 2 ...
It always amazes me that there are participants who are owed money by their retirement plans that seem to fall off the radar and go missing. But almost all plans, or at least large plans, have former participants that they are unable to locate that still have balances or are due benefits under their retirement plans. They usually find out a participant ...
Wellness plans have become very popular over the past decade. There are many vendors who often make it very easy for an employer to offer a wellness program. And while wellness programs can be a great thing for employers to offer, employers often don’t realize the rules that wellness programs must comply with in order to be legal.
In order for a ...
By Lyndsey Barnett and Christina Rogers*
While it’s no New Kids on the Block CD in the 90s, the hottest new benefit on the block is employee student loan repayment. Recently, the crisis of the mounting student loan debt faced by the millennial generation has come to the forefront of political discussions and has now crept into the world of ...
By Lyndsey Barnett and Benjamin White*
When an employee has a qualifying event that causes a loss of his or her group health plan coverage, an employer subject to COBRA is obligated to provide the employee, and any other qualified beneficiaries, with notice of their right to elect continuation coverage under COBRA. Employers are often not aware ...
The PCORI fee, which stands for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute fee, was one of the new fees imposed by the ACA on group health plans. All group health plans, regardless of the size of the plan, are required to pay the fee. The fee is due each July 31st regardless of the plan’s year end. For fully-insured plans, the responsibility for ...
Form 5500 filing season is upon us. Each July, we receive calls from clients on items that their plan auditors or Form 5500 preparers have detected. One common question that we receive is “What document is our ‘wrap’ document?” This question is one that never used to be asked by the preparers, but now seems to have made it on most of their ...
While Congress continues to battle over how to reform health care reform, employers must continue to comply with the Affordable Care Act, including the employer shared responsibility or pay or play provisions. In order to avoid penalties, large employers must provide “affordable” minimum value coverage to all full-time employees. Prior ...
As it does this time each year, the IRS announced the inflation adjusted amounts for Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). For calendar year 2018, an individual with self-only high-deductible health plan coverage will be able to contribution $3,450 to an HSA (up from $3,400 in 2017). An individual with family high-deductible health plan coverage will ...
Today the House passed a bill that overhauls many provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The text of the American Health Care Act was first released in early March. The Act repeals most of the Affordable Care Act taxes. There has been much debate over it during the past several months. While some thought the bill may be dead, an amendment to the bill ...
We are smack in the middle of Form 1094 and 1095 reporting season, so we are fielding a lot of reporting questions. I have received the same question in various forms multiple times this week so I thought it was worthy of a blog post. The conversation usually goes something like “Our vendor submitted our Form 1094-C file to the IRS and it was accepted ...
Yesterday evening, the House Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce Committees released the text of legislation they are introducing to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Taken together, these two pieces of legislation are called the American Health Care Act and, if enacted, will repeal many of the Affordable Care Act provisions and ...
In our experience, employers generally have procedures in place that ensure immediate termination of access to an employer’s network and computer systems upon the employee’s termination of employment. The termination of access almost always happens right away. And while you may be thinking, yes this is our procedure, do you have audit ...
Not really. On President Trump’s first day in office, he issued a number of executive orders. One of these orders dealt with the Affordable Care Act. The order instructs federal agencies to “exercise all authority and discretion available to them to waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation of any provision or ...
Shortly after the ACA was signed into law, we started our Benefits InSight Blog. The law was changing so fast under the ACA that we needed a way to push updates on new guidance out to our clients faster than our historical monthly newsletter. The tagline for our blog was The ACA – the only constant is change. So here we are almost 7 years after the passage ...
January is a popular month for wellness programs. Many employers wrap up open enrollment and get through the holidays and then hold their wellness fairs or rollout their biometric screenings and health risk assessments. But as of January 1, 2017, employers have a new obligation when it comes to their wellness programs.
Last year the EEOC issued ...
While many of us were in our party hats waiting for the ball to drop, a federal judge in Texas was issuing a decision in Franciscan Alliance v. Burwell granting a nationwide injunction prohibiting HHS from enforcing a portion of the nondiscrimination rules under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. As we have previously posted, Section 1557 ...
The ACA prohibits group health plans from having a waiting period in excess of 90 days. The prohibition went into effect for plan years beginning on or after January 1, 2014. Since this rule isn’t new, you may be wondering why I am writing this blog post about it now. In the past several months, I have spoken to several employers who were ...
The IRS issued a Notice today announcing that it is extending the deadline for distribution of Forms 1095-C. Under the Affordable Care Act, all large employers must complete and distribute a Form 1095-C to any employee who was considered a full-time employee for one or more months of the calendar year. The normal deadline for distributing such forms ...
Section 1557 is a new anti-discrimination section added by the ACA that prohibits in certain health programs and activities discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability. At first, the new provision did not receive much attention because we believe some companies saw it and thought “of course we ...
We have received multiple calls from panicked clients in the past several days due to the clients receiving Health Insurance Marketplace Notices from HHS. If you received one of these notices, please don’t panic quite yet. It does not necessarily mean that your company is subject to a shared responsibility penalty. You ...
The short answer is no. But if you offer coverage to some employees, you have to offer it to all “eligible employees.”
If you have fewer than 50 full-time equivalent employees, you are not subject to the pay or play penalties under the ACA if you fail to offer health plan coverage to your full-time employees. However, if you are ...
As an ERISA attorney, when I hear about a company providing great benefits, I immediately think of a good medical plan or a 401(k) that must have a large matching contribution. I saw an article this weekend that got my attention on a new strategy that some employers are using to get their young employees to save for retirement while ...
Lyndsey R. Barnett
If you are like many employers, you may have realized you were in over your head with these new reporting requirements or just didn’t have the time to get up to speed or prepare the forms and, therefore, you likely hired a third-party vendor to assist you in meeting these new obligations. Great first step on your part! However ...
Since we assume if you are reading this that you are an avid reader of our blog, you undoubtedly know that all large employers have to send new IRS Form 1095-C to their full-time employees by March 31st. See our prior post for more detail about the delay. If you’re an employer that sponsors a self-funded plan, you have to ...
At the 11th hour, the IRS announced that it is extending the deadlines for the new ACA reporting requirements. Instead of large and/or self-funded employers having to distribute a Form 1095-C to all of their full-time employees and employees enrolled in a self-funded health plan by February 1, 2016, employers now have ...
There have been many articles speculating as to what the pay or play employer mandate penalties would be for 2015. The ACA provides that both the $2,000 penalty for failing to offer minimum essential coverage to all of your full-time employees and the $3,000 penalty for failing to offer minimum value, affordable coverage to a ...
As we so often discover in this line of work, the answer is maybe. An employee assistance plan (“EAP”) may be designed to provide a wide range of services to employees to ease the anxiety of working life – and ideally increase workplace productivity in the process. Most EAPs are designed to address specific issues (e.g ...
As 2016 edges closer, the monthly and lookback measurements are a reality rather than just material for seminars. Even employers who are well educated on the process are likely to have situations come up that they hadn’t thought about how to handle under the ACA. One of these types of situations that we have received some ...
We previously wrote about offering coverage to interns, and now as the January 31st Form 1094/1095 deadline rapidly approaches, clients have started asking a logical follow-up question: ok, so I have to offer coverage if they work full-time and satisfy our waiting period, but do I have to report them as a full-time employee?
As the end-of-year notice season rolls along, keep in mind that you have a few more deadlines looming if you sponsor a retirement plan with a January 1st plan year and your plan contains any of the following features:
401(k) Safe Harbor Notice
If your plan is designed as a safe harbor plan to avoid ADP and/or ACP testing, you must send ...
As open enrollment season rolls along for most calendar year health plans, we know that you have enough to worry about without throwing another form into the mix. However, if you are a large employer (50 or more full-time equivalent employees) and you don’t require employees who waive coverage to sign a formal waiver, maybe ...
When I see the foliage changing every fall, it always reminds me of the IRS’s annual update to the retirement plan limits. The IRS adjusted most of the relevant limits last year (please ignore the reference in last year’s article about the Bengals disappointing – not this season!). This year, there was almost no ...
There is a lot of confusion as to whether an employer with a Health Reimbursement Arrangement (“HRA”) must report the employees participating in the HRA on Form 1095. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the IRS keeps changing its mind.
In the final draft of the 2015 Instructions for Forms 1094-B and 1095-B , the IRS ...