As a reminder, in 2015 Congress enacted legislation requiring a substantial increase in the penalties for a wide-range of employee benefit plan related violations. See our previous blog post for more background information on these changes. The initial spike in the amount of civil penalties were designed to be a “catch-up” adjustment to ...
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 ...