Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
By BLR Founder and CEO Bob Brady For years, BLR has surveyed HR and benefits professionals to find trends in benefits. We appreciate your participation in our monthly series of brief, targeted benefits surveys. Today’s survey topic: Incentive Compensation. (We’ll publish the results in a future issue.) Incentive comp is certainly on the front burner […]
A federal court has ordered the City of Pittsburgh to pay $825,000 in liquidated damages alone to more than 900 municipal police officers. (O’Hara v. City of Pittsburgh.) The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania made the award following a five-year delay by the city in implementing a 2006 letter of understanding […]
Employers and plan administrators that have a hard time choosing the version of the Form 5500 to file for earlier plan years, and which schedules to file, now have some help. That assistance comes from none other than the Department of Labor (DOL) — one of the agencies that imposes the filing requirement in the first […]
The Obama administration surprised many yesterday when the U.S. Department of Justice asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its appeal of a decision by the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta that the health insurance mandate provision found in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the comprehensive health care reform […]
If a plan participant needs a special diet that costs more than an ordinary, everyday diet, or had to have a hearing aid repaired, he or she can deduct those expenses. Specially Prepared Foods In Information Letter 2011-0035, the IRS said that if an individual consumes a special diet for medical reasons, the amount by […]
Human resources and employment law information — like everything else — is available in multiple formats from multiple sources. So whom do HR pros trust to help them stay current on human resources and employment law issues and in what format? Each year we ask our readers to tell us about their favorite sources to […]
In yesterday’s Advisor, attorney Allison West offered her “4 Serious Sins of Documentation.” Today, her take on employee explanations, plus an introduction to the all-HR-in-one website, HR.BLR.com. It’s critical to get the employee’s explanation for performance problems and to include it in your documentation, says West, principal at Employment Practices Specialists in Pacifica, California. Her […]
The Compensation Daily Advisor® announced today the release of a free report for compensation professionals, Top 100 FLSA Overtime Q&As. This report provides employers with an examination of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) overtime regulations in Q&A format, including tips for bringing workplaces into compliance in an affordable manner. It will be available […]
It’s important to disclose information through ERISA-required documents properly: it can be a plan administrator’s last line of defense if participants allege that they suffered losses because they didn’t know their rights or important plan terms. That obligation has grown in response to the financial scandals of the last decade (Enron, WorldCom, mortgage-leveraged bonds, etc.). […]
Employment law attorney Mike Maslanka of Dallas takes a look at the chapter on having difficult conversations with employees from As We Speak: How to Make Your Point and Have It Stick by Peter Meyers and Shann Nix. Previously, I wrote about As We Speak: How to Make Your Point and Have It Stick by […]