|
Employee Benefits Jobs
|
|
Webcasts and Conferences
|
|
|
|
[Official Guidance]
Text of IRS Publication 15-B: Employer's Tax Guide to Fringe Benefits for Use in 2015 (PDF)
31 pages. "What's New: Cents-per-mile rule.... Qualified parking exclusion and commuter transportation benefit.... Qualified parking exclusion and commuter transportation benefit.... Contribution limit on a health flexible spending arrangement (FSA) ... Additional permitted election changes for health coverage under a cafeteria plan ... Reminders: Same-sex Marriage ... 'Use-or-lose' rule for health FSAs ... Additional Medicare Tax withholding."
(Internal Revenue Service [IRS])
|
[Official Guidance]
Text of OPM Request for Applications: Multi-State Plan Program Advisory Board
" Applications will be accepted until February 16, 2015.... Members of the Advisory Board shall exchange information, ideas, and recommendations regarding OPM's administration of the [Multi-State Plan (MSP)] Program, including plan design, branding and marketing, network adequacy, and other topics ... This forum will serve to better inform OPM's policy development, rulemaking, and outreach activities with regard to the MSP Program.... A significant percentage of the Advisory Board members should be MSP Program enrollees or MSP Program enrollee representatives. Enrollee representatives may include public health and/or healthcare professionals (including providers, navigators, and assisters) or members of other consumer advocacy groups that have worked with or on behalf of healthcare consumers. Health insurance issuers or representatives of health insurance issuers will not be considered
for Advisory Board membership."
(Office of Personnel Management [OPM])
|
[Guidance Overview]
New ACA Affordability Rules Impact Cafeteria Plan Flex Credits
"[E]mployers may need to designate a portion of the total flex credit amount that may only be spent on benefits providing medical care (such as medical, dental, vision and health FSA) in order to be able to count the flex credit in the affordability calculation, including application of the affordability safe harbors under the Code 4980H regulations.... This final rule may have an even broader impact on employers that vary an employee's rate of pay based on enrollment in benefits, plans with cash waiver credits or opt-out payments, and those plans that provide cash in lieu of benefits to employees covered by the McNamara-O'Hara Service Contract Act (SCA)."
(Hill, Chesson & Woody)
|
[Guidance Overview]
Section 125 Plans: Amendments Required by December 31, 2014
"The $2,500 cap on salary reductions for health FSAs, which went into effect for 2013, must be documented by December 31, 2014 in the FSA plan documents. Employers that permitted carryovers of health FSA amounts up to $500 in 2013 or 2014 must document the carryover by December 31, 2014.... Plans may need to be amended ... to allow same-sex married participants to pay health insurance and other premiums on a pretax basis for spousal coverage ... The IRS also recently issued new rules allowing mid-year Section 125 plan changes for major medical coverage for an employee who changes employment status[.]"
(Frost Brown Todd LLC)
|
[Guidance Overview]
Massachusetts Becomes the Latest Jurisdiction to Require Paid Sick Leave
"Employers whose current paid time off (PTO) policies satisfy the amended statute's minimum leave and accrual obligations are not required to provide additional sick time in response to the new law. Moreover, employers may require employees to provide documentation from a health care provider for periods of sick time covering more than 24 consecutively scheduled hours of work."
(Mintz Levin)
|
[Guidance Overview]
ACA Compliance Check for Community Colleges
"California community college districts are in the process of finalizing safe harbors and measuring hours. However, there is more to the ACA than tracking hours of employees. In order to avoid potential penalties, community college districts should use this checklist to ensure they are not overlooking other important aspects of the ACA."
(Liebert Cassidy Whitmore)
|
Just in Time for the Holidays: Another HIPAA Settlement
"The breach resulted from malware that compromised ACMHS's information technology resources. OCR's investigation found that ACMHS [1] had never performed an accurate and thorough risk assessment ... [2] had never implemented Security Rule policies and procedures; and [3] since 2008, had failed ... to ensure that appropriate firewalls were in place and regularly updated with available patches."
(McDermott Will & Emery)
|
Welfare Benefit Plan Form 5500 Filing Requirements
"Despite the number and range of welfare plans that are excluded from the annual Form 5500 filing requirement, many company-sponsored welfare plans do not qualify for any of these exclusions. It is incumbent upon plan sponsors to fully understand all features of their welfare benefit plans and to accurately calculate the number of participants on the first day of each plan year in order to avoid potential delinquent Form 5500 filings."
(Schneider Downs)
|
Public Employee Plan Takes Sovaldi Cost to Court
"[The] mass transit provider for greater Philadelphia [Septa], is suing Gilead Sciences, the maker of the Hepatitis-C drug Sovaldi, for excessive pricing -- the first such lawsuit.... Septa has a workforce of around 9,000, with many more covered in a health plan for retirees, and says it has spent $2.4 million on Sovaldi through the first 11 months of the year. Gilead has charged far more than it needs to, argue lawyers for Septa ... The drug company is attempting 'to exploit the patent laws by selectively charging exorbitant prices,' [according to] a complaint filed in federal court in Philadelphia."
(Healthcare Payer News)
|
How 'Cromnibus' Helps Blue Cross and Blue Shield But Not Other Insurers
"Many of the nonprofit 'Blue' health plans receive tax breaks on their expenses and reserves as part of a 1980s arrangement in which they lost their broader tax-exempt status. Under the 2010 health law, Blue plans had to spend at least 85% of their revenue from insurance premiums on medical claims to continue to qualify for the breaks. The provision in the 'cromnibus' bill ... would let the Blue plans count spending on improving health-care quality toward the 85% threshold."
(The Wall Street Journal; subscription may be required)
|
Health Plan Renewal Delays Skyrocket
"Delaying health plan renewals appears to be the new normal under the [ACA], especially for small businesses. The number of such delays expected through December 1 soared 322% within the past year, while 94% of the 32% of respondents reporting this action were small firms with 100 or fewer employees. Many of them face rate increases ranging from 30% to 160% in states that did not allow renewal of grandfathered health plans[.]"
(Employee Benefit Adviser)
|
Many Obamacare Plans Set Out-of-Pocket Spending Limits Below the Cap
"Seventy-four percent of 2015 silver level plans' out-of-pocket spending caps are below the $6,600 spending limit allowed for individual plans and $13,200 maximum for family plans ... The average out-of-pocket maximum for 2015 individual silver plans will be $5,853 ... Silver was the most popular plan type this year, selected by about two-thirds of enrollees."
(Kaiser Health News)
|
Why a National High-Risk Insurance Pool Is Not a Workable Alternative to the Marketplace
"This issue brief draws on the PCIP experience to outline why national high-risk pools, which continue to be proposed as policy alternatives to ACA coverage expansions, are expensive to enrollees as well as their administrators and ultimately unsustainable. The key lesson -- and the principle on which the ACA is built -- is that insurance works best when risk is evenly spread across a broad population."
(The Commonwealth Fund)
|
|
Benefits in General; Executive Compensation
|
2015 Proxies Will Show Spike in Executive Pension Values
"Summary Compensation Table (SCT) disclosures of changes in pension values are set to see the largest increase in recent memory in 2015 proxies, thanks to a confluence of two events that took place in 2014: [1] In October, the Society of Actuaries released updated mortality tables to be applied when retirement plan sponsors estimate the financial obligations associated with their plans.... [2] Interest or discount rates for 2014 decreased markedly from 2013, which means pension liabilities increase because the plan will earn less interest on investments in the future. These changes will directly increase the change in pension value reported in the SCT, even in situations where an executive may have a frozen pension benefit."
(Towers Watson)
|
|
Press Releases
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Additional useful links:
BenefitsLink.com, Inc.
1298 Minnesota Avenue, Suite H
Winter Park, Florida 32789
Phone (407) 644-4146
Fax (407) 644-2151
Lois Baker, J.D., President
David Rhett Baker, J.D., Editor and Publisher
Holly Horton, Business Manager
Copyright 2014
BenefitsLink.com, Inc. — but feel free to forward this
newsletter without further permission from us, if you do not
modify the newsletter in any way (including this lower
portion).
All materials contained in this newsletter are
protected by United States copyright law and may not be
reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed,
published or broadcast without the prior written
permission of BenefitsLink.com, Inc., or in the case of
third party materials, the owner of that content. You
may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or
other notice from copies of the content.
Links to Web sites other than those owned by
BenefitsLink.com, Inc. are offered as a service to
readers. The editorial staff of BenefitsLink.com, Inc.
was not involved in their production and is not
responsible for their content.
We are proud of our
Privacy Policy.
Thanks for reading this newsletter!
|
