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 ...
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 ...
New Internal Revenue Code Sections 6055 and 6056 require that large employers (those with 50 or more full-time equivalent employees) and employers that sponsor self-funded group health plans file new IRS Forms 1094 and 1095 beginning in January 2016. A Form 1095 gets sent to all full-time employees regardless of whether ...
In the final regulations issued on the shared responsibility penalties (often referred to as the pay or play penalties), the Departments provided relief for 2015 to employers with between 50-99 full-time equivalent employees. If an employer qualifies for this relief and certifies its eligibility for the relief, it will not ...
It isn’t that often that the U.S. Supreme Court hears benefit issues and even more rare to have two highly-anticipated opinions impacting benefit plans be released in the same week. On June 26th, just one day after the Supreme Court upheld the ACA subsidies, the Supreme Court ruled same-sex couples have a constitutional ...
I LOVE Uber! I think it is the best thing since the creation of the dishwasher (because really isn’t the dishwasher better than sliced bread?). So when I saw this article in Forbes this week, it immediately made my stomach drop.
In most cases, Uber is considerably cheaper than taking a taxi. I was in LA last week and my taxi from ...
According to the a recent study by the DOL, only 61 % of employee benefit plan audits fully complied with professional auditing standards or had only minor deficiencies under the professional standards. That statistic is rather alarming to me. While employers often see spending money on the plan audit as a necessary evil ...
Over the past few months, I have worked with many frustrated employers as they were trying to get their systems and data ready to comply with the new ACA reporting requirements. In early 2016, all large employers and all self-funded employers are required to report information to the IRS to assist the IRS in assessing both the ...
The ACA changed the rules on employers offering wellness programs a few years back. A detailed discussion of these rules is found here. If these ACA rules aren’t complicated enough, the EEOC is proposing to change the rules even further. While I find it frustrating that yet another governmental agency finds the need to ...
Wellness programs are all the rage these days. All you need to do is walk down the street for a few minutes and you are bound to see someone checking their Fitbit for the amount of steps taken. In the past wellness programs consisted of smoking cessation programs and biometric screenings. But employers are getting more creative ...
As a matter of course, it seems that any change HHS may make to something as important as a health plan’s cost-sharing requirements would be loud and clear. Especially around March, common decency dictates that such changes should be in bold, underlined, and all in capital letters for the benefit of those understandably distracted by March ...
While I agree with the title, those aren’t my words but rather are the words of Senate Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch and Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley in a recent letter to the IRS. The paragraph below is another excerpt from the letter and pretty much sums up how I feel about the tax as well (if anyone cares):
When the ACA was passed into law in 2010, the Cadillac Tax and 2018 seemed so far away. We advised clients to tackle the ACA a few years at a time and not to get bogged down by provisions that went into effect 8 years out, such as the Cadillac Tax. Now that we are into 2015, 2018 and the Cadillac Tax don’t seem that far away ...
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 ...
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 ...
Most plan sponsors have the best of intentions in operating their 401(k) plans correctly. But mistakes happen to even the best of them. So what is a plan sponsor to do if an employee made a Roth deferral election but the employer took the money and contributed it on a pre-tax basis instead? In its latest newsletter the IRS details ...
As you likely already know, the ACA put a limit into place for health FSA plans. For plan years beginning on or after January 1, 2013, a health FSA plan could no longer permit participants to make salary reduction contributions in excess of $2,500 per year. While this new rule has been the law since the beginning of 2013, in Notice 2012-40
Can a traditional IRS be rolled into a Roth IRA? Yes, but a Roth IRA cannot be rolled into a traditional IRA. A SIMPLE IRA can be rolled into a SEP-IRA, but a SEP-IRA cannot be rolled into a SIMPLE-IRA. AHHHH! With all of the various types of plans and retirement accounts available today, the rollover rules are hard to keep ...
In order to avoid the pay or play penalties, employers must provide a plan that provides “minimum value.” A minimum value plan does not have to cover all essential health benefits, but must have an actuarial value of at least 60%. HHS issued a calculator that plan sponsors can use to determine if their plan provides minimum ...
Lyndsey Barnett
Many plan sponsors that I have spoken to would argue that there is no good news when it comes to having to pay the transitional reinsurance fees for their group health plans. As you likely already know, these fees for 2014 are $63 per covered life in your group health plan. However, the IRS did confirm one bit of good news last week. In ...
Each fall, many of the same things happen. The leaves fall. I drink too many pumpkin spice lattes. The Bengals start to disappoint. And, the IRS announces the retirement plan limits for the following calendar year. Right on cue, as I was sipping a pumpkin spice latte yesterday, the IRS announced the 2015 limits. A majority of these ...
If so, you should review the most recent ACA FAQ issued by the DOL. For those not familiar, reference-based pricing is a structure where the plan pays only a fixed dollar amount (or “reference price”) for a particular procedure. For example, a plan with a reference-based pricing structure may pay $20,000 for a knee ...
The new ACA reporting requirements don’t go into effect until the 2015 plan year. And the first reports are not due to employees until early 2016. Just because these rules were delayed a year doesn’t mean employers have no action to take this year. Besides tracking employees hours this year for your look-back period ...
The deadline for having revised business associate agreements (BAAs) in place is September 22nd, which is only one week away. If you have sent BAAs out to your business associates and haven’t received them back, you should follow-up this week to ensure the agreements are executed by the deadline. If a business associate ...
Many employers are nearing the end of their first look-back measurement period for purposes of determining full-time employment status for health plan coverage. Before you finalize your counts on who is a full-time employee, it is important to make sure that you have taken all hours into account. The pay or play rules require that ...
I receive this question a lot from clients. Under the ACA, all large employers are required to offer coverage to substantially all of their full-time employees or pay a penalty if any employee goes to the exchange and receives federal assistance. A large employer who avoids the first penalty may still owe a pay or play penalty ...
While drinking my coffee this morning, I came across an article that states that American opinion of the ACA has hit an all-time low with 53% of Americans having an unfavorable view of the ACA. To be honest, at first I was surprised that the percentage was so low based on my every day dealings with explaining the law to clients and ...
Yesterday, two federal appeals courts issued rulings on cases involving whether subsidies on the exchanges can be given to individuals who are enrolled in a plan on a federally run exchange. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down an IRS ruling authorizing subsidy payments to individuals enrolled in plans ...
One of the new fees introduced by the ACA is the PCORI fee. The PCORI fee is used to fund the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute and is payable by all group health plans. The fee is due to the IRS no later than July 31st, regardless of your group health plan’s plan year, and is payable on IRS Form 720. The fee for plan years ...
Shortly after the proposed regulations were issued, we published an article on the pay or play regulations. We have updated the article for the final regulations. This article is a good refresher on the basics of the pay or play mandates. It can also be a great tool if you need to explain the mandates to others (e.g., the CEO wants to ...
I have found that almost all HR or benefit professionals that assist with their company’s 401(k) or pension plan know that the retirement plan needs a summary plan description or SPD. Surprisingly, many of those same individuals don’t realize that their welfare plans, including their medical plan, also are required to have ...
Effective for the 2014 plan year, no group health plan can make an individual who is otherwise eligible to enroll wait longer than 90 days to enroll in the plan. This rule applies to all group health plans regardless of size and wasn’t delayed with the employer mandate. The rule doesn’t require employers to provide coverage ...
Prior to February, I never really understood the phrase “it takes a village to raise a child.” Then I gave birth to my first child and now that phrase hits home. While I never expected to compare raising a child to complying with a massive piece of legislation, in the case of the Affordable Care Act, I think it is comparable.
Over the ...
In December, we discussed why it is so important after the ACA for health FSA plans to be “excepted benefits.” In that blog post, we talked about the trap of employer credits and issues those can cause health FSAs. In this post, I want to explain several other practices which used to be common that cause a health FSA to not ...
…if not, you are in the minority. High-deductible health plans coupled with health savings accounts (HSAs) have gained increasing popularity over recent years. I read an interesting article that predicts that HSAs could quadruple their growth over the next six years. The article predicts that 50 million Americans will be ...
I asked myself this question many times and it took me quite some time to find the answer. The regulations on the new 6055 and 6056 rules make it very clear that even non-calendar year plans must begin reporting for the period beginning on January 1, 2015. The 6056 report requires a large employer to report each of its full-time ...
The general rule is that safe harbor 401(k) plans may not be amended mid-year with very limited exceptions. This rule is one that often frustrates plan sponsors and is one that the IRS has recently said it is taking under consideration. While the general rule still holds true, the IRS recently published guidance stating that plans ...
Lyndsey Barnett
The ACA has several new reporting requirements for insurers, self-funded plans and large employers. These new reports, referred to as the Section 6055 and 6056 reports, are intended to help the IRS determine who is subject to the individual mandate penalty and the employer pay or play penalties. Due to the complexity of the ...
The short answer is yes. While I get this question a lot from clients, Health Care Reform did not change the COBRA requirements. The DOL must want to ensure we understand COBRA is still relevant because earlier this month it released a new model COBRA election notice. The new model notice includes significant changes from the ...
Lyndsey Barnett
Yesterday, the Treasury Department issued final regulations under the employer shared responsibility rule (or as we refer to it the pay or play mandate). The regulations delay the pay or play mandate for employers with between 50-99 full-time employees until 2016. The regulations also provide relief from the no coverage ...
As you may have read in the news this week, another larger employer, Target Corp., announced that it will stop providing health insurance coverage to its part-time employees beginning in April. Similarly to Home Depot and Trader Joe’s, who both previously announced they would stop offering health insurance coverage ...
This week the Adult & Pediatric Dermatology, P.C. practice agreed to settle a HIPAA violation with HHS. The settlement included the small dermatology practice paying $150,000 payment to HHS, agreeing to perform a comprehensive risk analysis and agreeing to put a risk management plan in place to address and mitigate ...
I have seen a lot of articles lately on employers having an increased interest in providing voluntary benefits. I have also had more questions from clients on strategies and implementation of providing voluntary benefits. A voluntary benefit is an insurance arrangement under which employees pay the full premium and the ...
Lyndsey Barnett
The final HIPAA regulations that were issued by HHS in January 2013, required changes to the HIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices for all group health plans, including major medical plans, dental plans, vision plans and flexible spending account plans. The regulations required that the Notice of Privacy Practice be updated for ...
All I can say to these ads is WOW! Below are actual ads that are being run by the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative and ProgressNow Colorado to promote the exchanges and Obamacare. While I find the ads fairly humorous (at least as far as insurance ads go), I am not sure that they are going to do much for the public’s perception of ...
The answer depends on whom you ask.
If you ask the IRS, it seems to be going well and as planned. Sarah Hall Ingram, the director of the IRS Affordable Care Act office, recently stated at a hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that “the system and processes the IRS has developed to support enrollment in ...
Lyndsey Barnett
In the first two months following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a portion of DOMA, guidance from the federal agencies was non-existent to slow at best on how employers were supposed to react to the decision in their employee benefit plans. The agencies are finally starting to pick up the pace. In the past week ...
Beginning in January, almost all individuals are required to carry health insurance or they will be subject to the individual mandate penalty. Yesterday, the IRS released final regulations on the penalty, which in 2014 is the greater of $95 or 1% of an individual’s adjusted gross income (think last line of page 1 of your 1040 ...
Employers are generally sick of sending notices and employees are sick of receiving them…that is if they even read them. Our government, however, seems to like creating new notice requirements. The latest, the Exchange or Marketplace Notice, must be distributed by all employers for the first time no later than October 1st