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Compensation & Benefits

Benefits for terminally ill worker: How can we help?

08/21/2014
Q. A 26-year-old employee has terminal cancer and can’t work any longer. Our company is small and doesn’t offer health insurance, and she is not covered on an individual policy. Is it a correct protocol to lay off this employee so she can receive unemployment and other benefits, such as Medicaid?

Vacations: When we do take them, they’re too brief

08/21/2014
According to the U.S. Travel Association, 61% of employees leave three or more vacation days on the table every year, and they’re less likely to use up those days if they’re allowed to carry them over to the following year.

What to do when schedules affect child-support obligations?

08/20/2014
Question: We have weekly-paid employees who regularly work four consecutive weeks and then take two weeks off. As a result, some have trouble maintaining their monthly child support obligations. How might we work with the state agencies to accommodate our pay frequency so employees don’t end up in arrears?

Can ‘resign & rehire’ trick bypass open enrollment?

08/19/2014
Q. An employee failed to participate in open enrollment, thereby losing her insurance coverage. Can she resign and be immediately rehired to enroll in our medical plan as a new hire?

80,000 nonemployees download MGM staff’s healthy eating app

08/19/2014
MGM Resorts International em­­ployees who want to eat healthy while at work can check their progress on their smartphones. So can lots of others, it turns out.

IRS addresses corrections to the additional Medicare tax

08/19/2014
Correcting withholding errors in the 0.9% additional Medicare tax added by the Affordable Care Act continues to cause some confusion, since these corrections don’t follow the regular FICA correction rules. An updated frequently-asked-questions document from the IRS provides details on how to correct withholding errors in the additional Medicare tax.

Must we pay employees for unauthorized overtime when they check their messages?

08/18/2014
Q. We frequently have employees turn in time sheets with unapproved overtime—time they spend checking emails and voice mails. Do we have to pay em­­­­ployees for this time even though we have a workplace policy that prohibits unapproved overtime work?

Employers budget for 3.1% pay raises in 2015

08/18/2014
U.S. workers can expect pay raises averaging 3.1% in 2015, according to the 41st annual WorldatWork Salary Budget Survey. The nonprofit organization found that U.S. employers’ budgets for pay increases have risen slightly from 2.9% in 2013.

Advance health credits: The math may not be so simple

08/18/2014
No one likes surprises, least of all tax surprises. Employees who signed up for individual health insurance through a health insurance exchange, and who took the advance premium tax credit on a monthly basis, may be in for doozy of a tax bill, after they reconcile those advance credits with their eligibility for the actual credit on their 2014 Forms 1040.

CVS bans smokes from its campus as well as its shelves

08/15/2014
The drug store chain that famously announced it would rid its store shelves of tobacco products by Oct. 1 first made its own corporate campus tobacco-free.