The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recently released a memo eliminating the statute of limitations for penalties imposed by an employer’s failure to offer medical coverage to full-time employees under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This announcement gives the IRS the flexibility to assess these penalties for an undisclosed number of years. The employer mandate under [...]
Not only will employees be ringing in the New Year on January 1, 2020, but in select states, they will also be celebrating higher wages. Twenty-one states are set to increase their minimum wage rates starting the first of the year, with Connecticut, Washington D.C., Delaware, Nevada, and Oregon increasing their rates later in the [...]
Form W-4, retitled Employee's Withholding Certificate, has undergone rounds of significant revisions since updates to the tax codes were announced by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017 and implemented last year. The final version, designed to make accurate income-tax withholding easy for employees starting in 2020, was released on December 5, 2019, by [...]
The Affordable Care Act's (ACA) individual mandate for employees was officially repealed on January 1, 2019. However, Congress did not repeal the ACA requirements for employers. Applicable large employers (ALE) with 50 or more employees are still required to provide access to healthcare to employees and meet annual reporting requirements. To avoid year-end scrambling, employers [...]
Your IT department likely keeps up with a number of data security measures as it relates to company systems, but what can you do within the payroll or HR department to keep your employee data secure? While you cannot stop criminals from attempting to steal your data, you can thwart their efforts [...]
The Department of Labor (DOL) issued a final rule on September 24, 2019, updating the salary threshold for exempt employees. Now, employees making less than $35,568 a year cannot be considered exempt and must earn overtime pay beginning January 1, 2020. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the new threshold will make 1.3 million [...]
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System maintains a list of federal banking holidays for the current year and the following four years. As 2020 approaches, you should take note of upcoming federal banking holidays and how they may impact your payroll processing schedule. Preparing now will help ensure your employees are paid [...]
Asking about an interviewee’s salary history, once a standard practice for many employers to eliminate certain people from their hiring pool, will no longer be allowed in various cities and states soon. In the past, employers have used this information to set compensation rates for new employees, which many have argued increases the pay disparity [...]
With the passage of HB 2240, as of September 1, 2019, Texas employers can pay their employees with payroll debit cards without receiving the consent of their employees first. Before the passing of HB 2240, Texas employers had to receive permission from their employees before paying wages through payroll cards. Now, under the new law, [...]
In April, a federal judge accepted a proposal from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to extend the EEO-1 Component 2 reporting deadline to September 30, 2019. The EEO-1, also known as The Employer Information Report, is an annual report required of employers who have at least 100 employees, excluding public schools, universities, state and [...]
