QSLOB? Less than 50 employees?

[justanotheradmin]

This might be better on another board, if so, I apologize.

Companies A and B are a classic controlled group. My question is related to the 50 employee requirement for QSLOB. in all other respected the two companies seem to meet the QSLOB requirements.

They want to be able to provide substantially different benefits to each company, and presently, combined testing would fail, hence the QSLOB analysis.

Company A has 75 employees, company B only has 25. What happens to Company B when Company A is a QSLOB? Is B treated as a stand-along QSLOB by default since company A is no longer treated as part of the ER group?

Does company B need to do anything in particular? Or do they have to do testing on the basis of the full control group, while company A can just do their own testing, ignoring Company B?

I apologize if these are really basic questions, I haven't needed to look at QSLOBs in the real world until now.

[Lou S.]

I'm pretty sure you can't have a QSLOB with less than 50 employees. So Company B with 25 employees would have to be included with one of the QSLOB lines. Since you only have 2 companies in the example, you don't have a QSLOB.

So what you have is a controlled group falling under one testing scheme. That is you can't disregard the employees of B when testing A's plan and you can't disregard the employees of A when testing B's plan.