As part of the release of the 2021 annual adjustment to the civil monetary penalties, the DOL has provided benefit plans with the ever important reminder of the severity of the penalties that can be assessed for failing to file Form 5500. Effective for penalties assessed after January 15, 2021, the DOL per day penalty for failure to properly file an ...
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 ...
In our recent post, we discussed the EEOC’s newest proposed wellness program rules under the ADA and GINA. As of this week, those proposed rules have been formally withdrawn by the EEOC. The proposed rules were posted unofficially on the EEOC’s website but were not published in the Federal Register before President Biden took office.
As part of ...
Recently, the EEOC finally released their proposed wellness regulations. These regulations replace regulations that were released in 2016 but were withdrawn by the EEOC in 2019 due to court challenges and confusion. These new proposed regulations address wellness programs under both the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) and the ...
Guidance provided by the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 (the “Act”) will temporarily help employers determine if their retirement plans have experienced a “partial termination.” We discussed partial terminations in our recent blog post, and the Act supplements all prior guidance with a bright-line rule for determining when ...
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 ...
Employers want to attract and retain the best talent available. Employers today are cognizant that employees entering the workforce are burdened by mounting student loan debt, and many employers have explored the benefit options available to provide student loan debt relief for their employees. Until the CARES Act, employers were for the most ...
Congress passed, and the President finally signed, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (“CAA”). This bill, the fifth longest bill to be passed in the history of Congress, contains over seventy new tax policies, extensions, refinements, and other tax-law clarifications. Within its over 5000 pages is The Taxpayer Certainty and ...
As discussed in our prior post, last July the Department of Labor (“DOL”) and Health and Human Services (“HHS”) released proposed rules regarding grandfathered health plans. Earlier this month, the two agencies issued the final grandfathered plan rules. The final rules follow the proposed rules with no substantive changes.
As a ...