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 ...
Jamie Scott
There seems to have been a recent rash of thefts involving electronically stored health information, including names and social security numbers. Most stolen health information is taken by stealing the flash drive, laptop or desktop on which the information is stored. It is difficult to tell in these cases whether the target of ...
Yesterday the IRS issued well over 100 pages of proposed regulations dealing with the massive new reporting requirements imposed by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on large employers (more than 50 employees), insurance carriers and self-insured employers. These proposed regulations (issued under IRC sections 6055 and 6056) are ...
This afternoon the Treasury Department and IRS announced that all legal same-sex marriages will be recognized for federal tax purposes wherever marriage is a factor, including the income, estate and employee benefits provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. This ruling, released as Revenue Ruling 2013-17, means that ...
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 ...
The Kaiser Family Foundation has produced a cartoon called The YouToons Get Ready for Obamacare. YouToons are little people with big heads that represent average Americans and that have a remarkable resemblance to Wii characters. The cartoon is about 7 minutes long and provides a surprising amount of information in an ...
Hopefully the federal government, including both the IRS and DOL, has learned a lesson from the poor communication efforts in implementing Health Care Reform. Too many notice requirements (see my colleague Lyndsey Barnett’s post) and multiple effective dates have confused employees and employers alike and contributed to ...
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
On August 1, 2013, a Treasury Department press release announced the launch of a website providing health care reform information to small business owners. To get started on the website, you input the state of business operations, the number of its full-time employees (including full-time equivalents), and whether health insurance ...
One challenge to keeping health information private as required under HIPAA is in knowing all of the places where it is stored in paper form or electronically. HHS just announced a resolution agreement with Affinity Health Plan (a not-for-profit managed care plan serving the New York metropolitan area) after it was discovered that ...