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Recent Big-Ticket HIPAA Settlements Drive Home Need for Organizational Commitment

By David Slaughter, JD, Senior Legal Editor The month of July saw two hospitals reach multimillion-dollar Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy and security settlements with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Each case began with that most mundane of data breaches, the stolen laptop, but once HHS investigators started […]

ERISA, FLSA, FMLA Penalties Increased by DOL Rule

By David Slaughter, JD, Senior Legal Editor Maximum penalties for violating many employment and benefits laws were increased, some of them substantially, by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) in a departmentwide rule published July 1 (81 Fed. Reg. 43429).

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Managing Employee Status Changes Under the Affordable Care Act

By Jennifer Carsen, JD, Senior Legal Editor So, you think you’ve got a pretty good handle on this whole Affordable Care Act (ACA) thing. You know that you’re an applicable large employer (or ALE—and that “ALE” isn’t merely that thing you want to drink a lot of after a day of filling out ACA paperwork).

How Effective Is Your Succession Planning?

Do you have a plan in place today to identify and train the people who will lead your organization tomorrow? In today’s Advisor, we get expert advice on how to plan for your organization’s continued success.

Employers can learn lessons from DOL’s FLSA woes

Many thought it ironic in mid-August when news broke that the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) had agreed to a $7 million settlement in a 10-year-old dispute with its own employees and their union. The same agency charged with policing how employers comply with the wage and hour law apparently had compliance problems of its […]

Employee Goal-Setting Tips

Setting appropriate employee goals is an important component of keeping the workforce productive and motivated. It can also affect retention since clear expectations are a critical component of employee satisfaction levels. And organizations that opt to implement pay-for-performance programs have an added layer of accountability by putting a piece of the employee’s compensation on the […]

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What did Ryan Lochte do? 8 tips for waterproof investigations

Despite the conclusion of the 2016 Summer Olympics, Ryan Lochte is still “under water” with questions still looming after Rio police reports that the American gold-medal Olympian fabricated a story about being robbed at gunpoint in Brazil. Lochte initially reported that he and three other U.S. swimmers—James Feigen, Jack Conger, and Gunnar Bentz—were robbed at gunpoint […]