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Compensation & Benefits

Reporting agents: IRS offers new guidance on your responsibilities, rights

10/03/2012
Payroll reporting agents are service bureaus and other businesses that can handle all of your payroll duties, including depositing taxes and filing forms. New guidance from the IRS is designed to help you keep tabs on your reporting agent.

Health care firm faces possible FLSA class action

10/02/2012
A lawsuit against home health care and hospice provider Amedisys seeks national class action status and challenges the way the company pays its visiting nurses and home health care aides. The company operates in 41 states, including North Carolina.

Special analysis: Lifestyle benefits = payroll taxes

09/28/2012
Corporate HR departments love nontraditional benefits—perks other than leave, health insurance and retirement benefits—because they’re generally cheap and build loads of employee good will. But many so-called lifestyle benefits are taxable, much to HR’s chagrin.

Is there an hourly threshold employees must pass to earn paid holidays?

09/26/2012

Q. Is there a law that states the number of hours necessary to be considered full time for being eligible for paid holidays? Our handbook says an employee who works fewer than 40 hours a week is considered part time. An employee who works 34 hours a week wonders if he should be eligible for paid holidays. Our handbook says he’s not. Is that OK?

New law allows for 8/80 health care workweek

09/26/2012
A new law amends the Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Law to bring it into line with the FLSA, which requires health care employers to pay overtime only if employees work more than eight hours in a day or 80 hours in a 14-day period.

Employee ‘GEMs’ honored in front of bosses and peers

09/25/2012
Executives at Compass Group believe their front-line employees make magic. In fact, the brass calls the housekeeping and facilities management firm’s hourly employees “GEMs,” which stands for “Great Employees Make Magic.”

23-cent bonus adds up to one big payroll headache

09/24/2012
If an employer retains complete control over whether to pay a bonus and the amount of the bonus, then it can be excluded from an employee’s regular rate as a discretionary bonus. But both parts of this test count equally. Recently, a federal trial court ruled that bonuses that always equaled $50 failed the second part of the test.

Is it legal for us to restrict when employees may take small amounts of vacation time?

09/21/2012

Q. We recently needed to cut back on some of our employees’ shifts, meaning that some of them now work less than 40 hours per week. In order to bring their hours up to 40, these workers have been filling in their time sheets with varying amounts of their earned vacation. Are we permitted to restrict when our employees may use their earned vacation?

What is California’s law concerning leave for school-related activities?

09/21/2012

Q. With the start of the school year, several of our employees have asked to leave work early to attend parent orientation events at their child’s school. Are we obligated to grant employees time off for these events?

Cooked books pad Thai restaurants’ earnings

09/21/2012
A U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division investigation has uncovered willful FLSA violations by two Chan Dara Thai restaurants in Los Angeles.