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…
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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…
Whether you are a working employee, someone in their retirement or an employer/plan sponsor, the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 has something for everyone. It was included as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023, which was passed by Congress on December 23, 2022 and signed into law by President Biden on December 29, 2022. While there is something for everyone, we will focus on the areas in which it affects employers. Some items are effective this year while others will phase in over the next couple of years, but it may be a good idea to start planning today.…
There are two questions that are brought up when talking about the topic of whether to deduct credit card processing fees before paying out charge tips to your employees. Can you do it, and should you do it? Credit card processing fees can be a significant expense to any business. In 2022, the average credit card processing fee ranged between 1.5% and 3.5% of the sale. There are a number of businesses that charge the consumer a convenience fee when paying by card over cash to cover this added expense, but that practice has not caught on for restaurants. At…
Over the next few weeks, as your employees start to receive their 2022 W-2 form, they will most likely have many questions as to what all those numbers mean. For example, it is not uncommon for a salaried employee who earns $50,000 per year question why their Box 1 Wages only reflects $45,000. Did they get underpaid? Probably not. If the employee contributes to a pension plan (aka 401(k)) or has pre-tax insurance deductions, then those amounts reduces the “taxable” wage, which is what appears in Box 1. Some employees may also wonder why their Federal Income Tax withheld is…
For over a decade the Federal minimum wage remains at $7.25 per hour, but more than half the states and many cities, counties and locals have set increases effective January 1st, 2023 with a few announcing a change during 2023. The progress to $15.00 per hour marches on and a number of states and cities are now well beyond that. Areas in Washington state are even approaching $20.00 per hour. A list of each state/local that has announced a change in 2023, at the time of this publishing, along with the new hourly rate is listed below. Any state that…
Depending upon exactly what is being changed, your work may be cut out for you, and parts are often missed. Which is especially important when it comes to payroll. Let’s start with identifying what name is actually changing. A corporation or LLC has a registered name which can be indicated as such in the name of the business. That business may decide to operate under a different name to the public. This would be the doing business as (DBA) name, which some states will call a Fictitious Name or Trade Name. For example, Makin’ Money, Inc. can operate an ice…
I wrote an article over 3½ years ago about direct deposit fraud, first published in the FBI annual Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) report for 2018, when about 100 complaints were reported. Today, years later, we are finding it occurring on too-regular of a basis, and I would not be surprised if there were 100 complaints a day. How it occurs is the fraudster diverts an employee’s paycheck to their “bank account,” which they will then clear out as soon as the funds hit on pay day. The two questions you may be asking are ‘how do they change the…
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…
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…