Insights on benefits counseling and litigation issues impacting employers nationwide
As the calendar year comes to an end, group health plan sponsors must remember that if they took advantage of the ACA relief of IRS Notice 2014-55, amendments to their cafeteria plans by year end are needed.
Notice 2014-55 was effective as of September 18, 2014, and it allowed participants to revoke a cafeteria…
Since the enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), larger employers have wondered about an auto-enrollment provision that the ACA added to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Under that provision, employers that are subject to the FLSA and which employed more than 200 full-time employees would have been required to automatically enroll new full-time…
An “applicable large employer” is subject to a penalty if either (1) the employer fails to offer to its full-time employees (and their dependents) the opportunity to enroll in minimum essential coverage (MEC) under an eligible employer-sponsored plan and any full-time employee obtains a subsidy for health coverage on a government exchange (Section 4980H(a) liability)…
One strategy for minimizing exposure to the employer shared responsibility penalties under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is to minimize the number of “full-time employees” – that is, the number of employers working 30 or more hours per week on average. Employers can accomplish this through reducing the number of hours certain current and future…
Since April, employers have been mulling over proposed wellness program regulations issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to address certain issues under the American with Disabilities Act (ADA). We briefly summarized those proposed rules, and remind readers that there still is time to submit comments to the EEOC in order to seek…
As you may already know, generally, each “applicable large employer” (see our article Health Care Reform: Employers Should Prepare Now for 2015 to Avoid Penalties to determine if you are an applicable large employer) is required to file information returns with the IRS (Form 1094-C) and provide statements to its employees (Form 1095-C) about the…
Today the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) published long-awaited proposed regulations on wellness programs (Proposed Regs) that are intended to harmonize certain provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) with long-standing rules concerning wellness programs applicable to group health plans under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and more recently, the Affordable…
The Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) added section 4980I to the Internal Revenue Code (“Code”). Code section 4980I applies to tax years after December 31, 2017, and provides a tax on high cost employer-sponsored health coverage – if the aggregate cost of employer-sponsored coverage (referred to as “applicable coverage”) provided to an employee exceeds a statutory…
We reported in December 2014, that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) said it was planning to issue proposed regulations (scheduled for February 2015) that would “promot[e] consistency between the ADA and HIPAA, as amended by the ACA,” and “clarify[] that employers who offer wellness programs are free to adopt a certain type of inducement…
Since filing multiple litigations against employers concerning their wellness programs, including seeking a temporary restraining order against Honeywell International, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has faced a significant amount of push back from many U.S. companies, their CEOs and other organizations.
The reason … programs designed to be compliant with the wellness …
