Kushner & Company Blog

On the last possible workday on which to provide needed guidance before health plan sponsors had to fend for themselves on when the COBRA and HIPAA Outbreak Period ended, the Employee Benefits Security Administration, part of the US Department of Labor, issued Disaster Relief Notice 2021-01.

The US Department of Labor (DOL) is the responsible agency for overseeing compliance with ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. Penalties for a variety of ERISA violations are contained within the law and are indexed annually for inflation. They've increased substantially.

We provided information at the end of April, 2020 about the IRS' and DOL's determination that the "pause" button was hit on a number of regular timing and payment due dates relating to COBRA, health plan claims (including health care FSA claims), and HIPAA Special Enrollment Periods. Is it ending?

The Consolidated Appropriations Act contains many benefit changes, all of which are optional on the part of the employer. We know this is coming long after open enrollment has ended for most plans, but employers will want to pay close attention and decide which (if any) they'd like to adopt.

This is a very difficult question, since neither the IRS nor the DOL has addressed it directly.

The IRS has now released all of the 2021 benefit limits. Earlier this year, they also released the High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP) and Health Savings Account (HSA) limits.

On October 2, 2020, citing employers’ and insurers’ need for additional time to provide individuals with the Form 1095-Bs and 1095-Cs, the IRS issued Notice 2020-76 extending the deadline from January 31, 2021 to March 2, 2021 to provide those forms.

Employers that offer prescription drug benefits are required to provide an annual notice to all Medicare-eligible plan participants and qualified beneficiaries before October 15th of each year, the start of the Medicare open enrollment period. Most send it to all participants.

The same IRS Notice (2020-68) that addresses Qualified Birth or Adoption Distributions (QBADs) also deals with how to handle the SECURE Act’s inclusion of long-term part-time employees and their eligibility for 401(k) plans.

While QBADs have been permissible since January 2020 under the SECURE Act, many employers have been waiting for some IRS guidance on how these distributions would be implemented before making a decision as to whether to include a QBAD as a plan feature. IRS Notice 2020-68 does that (and a bit more).

Kushner & Company, an international HR strategy and employee benefits consulting and administration firm, has announced the appointment of its new CEO, Jennifer Alfieri.

Much has been written about the calculations necessary to compute the amount of payroll costs that must be a major component of PPP loan forgiveness. In fact, at least 60% of the forgivable amount (previously 75%) must come from allowable payroll costs. So what constitutes payroll costs?