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Posts published in “Employee Management”

Important notice: Do you have a level-funded health plan for your employees?

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Selecting a health insurance plan for your employees is harder than ever, with the exponentially rising costs and endless number of plans. Not only are there many different carriers to choose from, but there are also three different types of plans available:   Fully-insured health plan: You may even call this the traditional insurance plan, where the employer pays a monthly premium and the insurance company pays all claims.   Self-funded health plan:  This is where the insurance company is paid an administrative fee and the employer acts as the insurer, paying the claims as they are incurred. This plan is typically…

OSHA Reporting Begins February 1 For Many Employers

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The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to ensure safe and healthful working conditions for workers. It is a division of the U.S. Department of Labor and they set and enforce standards, as well as reporting requirements. In short, it is one more set of government regulations many businesses will need to comply with or otherwise, face penalties. Employers with 11 or more employees, at any point in 2023, are required to post OSHA Form 300A, Summary of Work-Related Injury and Illnesses, from February 1 through April 30, unless they qualify…

Can Employers Mandate Direct Deposit?

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According to Payroll.org (formerly the American Payroll Association,) 93% of employees they questioned use direct deposit. My belief is that they only surveyed their members, payroll professionals. I doubt they surveyed real America and got feedback from the fast food worker, agricultural workers or the mechanic down the street. Not that payroll professionals aren’t real America, but you know what I mean. Based on what I find in practice, direct deposit is less than a 60% adoption rate. Maybe even much less than 50% because I am not looking at the small businesses that run their own payrolls in-house on…

New USCIS Form I-9 Released August 1, 2023

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On August 1, 2023, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services published the latest version of Form I-9.  The new version can be downloaded here: https://www.uscis.gov/i-9.  Employers should begin to use this new form immediately, and starting November 1, 2023, ONLY this new version will be allowed.  If your employees use PayMaster HCM to complete the Form I-9, we will update to the new version in the coming weeks. There are many big changes with this version.  Wording has been changed from ‘alien’ to ‘noncitizen,’ which I always thought was weird in the first place, and the form was redesigned to…

E-Verify – The Florida Edition

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed Florida’s Senate Bill 1718 into law on May 10, 2023.  This bill has a broad purpose to obstruct the flow of illegal immigration in the state and imposes some of the toughest penalties in the country.  It ‘enhances’ the crime of human smuggling, which is a good thing, but imposes a new rule for employers in the state. Effective July 1, 2023, private employers with 25 or more employees, and public employers, are now required to use the federal E-Verify system to verify employment eligibility of ALL new hires. There is NO requirement to verify employees who began employment prior to that effective date. So…

Biometric Technology and Data Privacy Laws

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There has been an increase in biometric privacy class action lawsuits, which should bring concerns to employers. First and foremost, what is biometric data? Biometric data refers to any data that identifies or is related to an individual’s physical, physiological or behavioral characteristics, such as fingerprints, iris scans, facial recognition, hand recognition, voice recognition, DNA or any other unique biological information. With the rise of biometric technologies, concerns over the privacy and security of biometric data have become increasingly important. Securing an employee’s biometric data should be held in the same regard, if not higher, as other data, such as…

Jury Duty – An Employers Responsibilities

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Jury duty.  It is something that many people dread being called for, but being summoned and responding is a civic duty and an honored privilege, critical to our judicial system.  That can be an article all to itself, but today we will cover how the employer handles calls to jury duty by their employees. Employers are prohibited by state laws from terminating or penalizing an employee, in any way, who is called to serve on jury duty.  Being laid off would certainly dissuade people from serving, so the states provide a bit of protection to the employee.  If the employee…

Calculating Overtime Properly

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Overtime. It is a subject that you may think you know well, but do you? It is not always a simple matter of paying the employee “time and a half” for any hours worked in excess of 40 hours in a workweek. There is much more to take into consideration, and while this article is not intended to cover every scenario out there, we will touch a number of bases. What we will not cover, this time around, is who may be exempt from overtime. Let’s start with the federal law, where the overtime provisions are contained in the Fair…

Business Owners Responsible for Identifying Employees Who Are on the U.S. Sanctions List

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Over two decades ago, as a result of 9/11, President G.W. Bush signed the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (The PATRIOT) Act of 2001 into law. One purpose of the PATRIOT Act is to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world by putting in measures to prevent, detect and prosecute money laundering and financial terrorism. One may ask themselves, what does this have to do with payroll?  Plenty. The Act states that all individuals and organizations within the United States are responsible for ensuring that…

A SSN Card Does Not Mean a Person is Eligible to Work

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The last time I wrote about Social Security Numbers (SSNs) over four years ago, it was a fun and educational piece about the history of the SSN. You can check it out at this link: https://blog.paymaster.com/a-history-and-education-about-the-ssn/ These days, the SSN has become more important than ever, and it is of utmost importance to get it right. Of course, you should always get the SSN right for compliance with the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS, but that does not always happen. The filing of state employment and unemployment taxes has become more sophisticated over the recent years by utilizing…