Our previous post on the 21st Century Cures Act, outlined an important change to the ACA and the Internal Revenue Code. Small businesses may again offer stand-alone HRAs so long as they meet the requirements of a Qualified Small Employer Health Reimbursement Arrangement (“QSEHRA”), which will not be treated as group health plans and not ...
Yesterday evening, the House Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce Committees released the text of legislation they are introducing to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Taken together, these two pieces of legislation are called the American Health Care Act and, if enacted, will repeal many of the Affordable Care Act provisions and ...
Generally, fixed indemnity health plans are used to supplement coverage under a group medical plan. A fixed indemnity plan should be a type of excepted benefit that provides tax free cash payments to participants and beneficiaries. However, it’s easy to botch the tax benefits and unintentionally subject these indemnity plans to ERISA ...
An employer signed to a collective bargaining agreement may be obligated to make contributions to a multiemployer pension plan. That pension plan is likely severely underfunded. Most contributing employers are generally familiar with the concept of withdrawal liability. They at least know that it’s a big scary number. But, it should not be ...
In our experience, employers generally have procedures in place that ensure immediate termination of access to an employer’s network and computer systems upon the employee’s termination of employment. The termination of access almost always happens right away. And while you may be thinking, yes this is our procedure, do you have audit ...
Most employee benefit plans offered through an employer are subject to ERISA. There is a safe harbor exemption from ERISA for certain voluntary plans. Traditionally, the types of programs that may qualify as voluntary include life, vision, dental, disability, critical-illness and accident insurance plans. However, these benefit programs can ...
Generally, the purchaser in an asset sale is not responsible for liabilities incurred by the seller prior to sale. Of course, there are exceptions. An important exception to the general rule is found in the context of multiemployer pension plans. It’s an exception that can be catastrophic for the unwary buyer. If the buyer has notice of the ...
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 ...