As discussed in our other coronavirus related blog posts, new legislation intended to ease the economic consequences stemming from the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak by expanding FMLA and sick leave available to employees and providing tax credits to employers providing the leave has been passed. The legislation also ...
While leave-sharing programs are common in the public sector, many private sector employers have not yet embraced these programs. For many, the tax issues involved with such a program are more trouble than they are worth. In an attempt to find a silver-lining to the current health situation, this post examines how the current national emergency ...
The coronavirus pandemic has already caused financial strain on Americans, and many are predicting this effect to continue. We have received questions from plan sponsors and have been contemplating how they should respond to plan participants when they request a withdrawal from their retirement account. Although options do exist, they are ...
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 ...
On March 11, 2020, the IRS issued Notice 2020-15 which announced that high deductible health plans (“HDHP”) may offer testing and treatment for COVID-19 without co-pays or deductibles. Plan sponsors are not required to offer these services without cost-sharing but are permitted to do so if they choose.
Notice 2020-15 provides that an HDHP ...
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 discussed in our most recent blog post, the SECURE Act increased the IRS penalties for failure to file Form 5500 by ten times effective December 31, 2019. The IRS now has the authority to assess a penalty for late filers up to $250 a day, up to a maximum penalty of $150,000 per plan year. But even with the increase in the IRS penalties, they still pale ...
As we continue our review of the SECURE Act, we turn our attention to a new optional provision that is designed to help defray the costs of adoption and child-birth. This new distribution option was created when the SECURE Act expanded the list of items excluded from the additional income tax on early distributions contained in IRC Section 72(t).
As discussed in our previous blog post, the SECURE Act changes the date that employees are required to begin making retirement distributions from qualified plans from the April 1st after reaching age 70 ½ to the April 1st after reaching age 72. This is not the only significant change made to the required minimum distribution rules. The SECURE Act ...
Changes have been made to the penalties that may be assessed against employers since our last article on Form 5500 filings. As a reminder, Form 5500 is the information return that must be filed by most employee benefit plans subject to ERISA (unless an exception applies), and failure to file this annual return for a plan can result in assessment of ...