As it does this time each year, the IRS announced the inflation adjusted amounts for Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). For calendar year 2018, an individual with self-only high-deductible health plan coverage will be able to contribution $3,450 to an HSA (up from $3,400 in 2017). An individual with family high-deductible health plan coverage will ...
Those of us who follow HIPAA enforcement actions have become accustomed to seeing multi-million dollar settlements with HHS resulting from HIPAA privacy and security violations. Without fail, those large settlements have involved the disclosure of hundreds, or even thousands, of patient records (or in the case of health plans, participant ...
Today the House passed a bill that overhauls many provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The text of the American Health Care Act was first released in early March. The Act repeals most of the Affordable Care Act taxes. There has been much debate over it during the past several months. While some thought the bill may be dead, an amendment to the bill ...
Today, the Trump Administration released its goals for tax reform. Intended to be the most significant tax reform in American History, the Trump Administration outlined proposed changes for individuals and corporations.
For individuals, the tax plan proposes to reduce the number of tax brackets from seven to three (10%/25%/35%). The ...
In 2015, President Obama signed an executive order that, among other things, created an obligation for certain federal contractors to provide paid sick leave to certain employees. In 2016, the DOL published a final rule to implement the paid sick leave requirements on employers that enter into covered contracts with the federal government on ...
Even in the Trump era, HHS has not slowed its pursuit of monetary settlements for HIPAA violations. Recent settlements have included payments of $2,140,000 for allowing PHI to be publicly accessible on the internet; $2,200,000 for theft of unencrypted PHI stored on a pen drive, and $5,500,000 for disclosure of electronic PHI due to failure to ...
Recently, there has been a whirlwind of change and even more speculation about potential changes to the laws governing employee benefit plans. Some rules haven’t changed, but should not be forgotten. The compliance requirements relating to plan documents, remain intact and the risk of non-compliance could be lethal for an unwary ...
Generally, an individual seeking benefits under an ERISA plan must exhaust the administrative remedies as a prerequisite to filing a lawsuit. Typically, administrative remedies include submitting a timely appeal to the plan administrator, usually the employer, as described in the summary plan description and plan documents. The denial of ...
As it did last year, the IRS extended the deadline for distributing Form 1095-C to employees. Large and/or self-funded employers had until March 2, 2017 to distribute a Form 1095-C to all of their full-time employees and employees enrolled in a self-funded health plan, which was not as long of an extension as the IRS gave the prior year. The normal ...
We are smack in the middle of Form 1094 and 1095 reporting season, so we are fielding a lot of reporting questions. I have received the same question in various forms multiple times this week so I thought it was worthy of a blog post. The conversation usually goes something like “Our vendor submitted our Form 1094-C file to the IRS and it was accepted ...