Regulation

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a request by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) to expedite review of Virginia’s lawsuit challenging PPACA’s individual mandate.

Employee benefit plan sponsors, fiduciaries and administrators that are using or interested in expanding the use of e-mail, automated phone systems, websites or other electronic media to communicate with plan participants and beneficiaries should review and share their input with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employee Benefit Security Administration (EBSA) in response to its Request for Information regarding electronic disclosure. The deadline is June 6.

The U.S. Supreme Court took no action Monday on a request to speed up a ruling on President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law.

Employers who fail to remit timely participant contributions to a 401(k) plan on their Form 5500 are likely to receive a letter from the Employee Benefits Security Administration regarding the potential use of the Department of Labor's Voluntary Fiduciary Correction program. The letter informs employers that the failure to remit participant contributions, or the untimely remittance of participant contributions, violates ERISA. Such failure can result in significant civil penalties for the employer.

As a professional who assists in conducting hundreds of employee benefit plan audits each year, I have seen everything and heard so many lame excuses for the errors that we find. Some infractions range from plans allowing participation to ineligible participants, to not allowing eligible participants to participate timely, or even at all. Although the list of mistakes plan sponsors make is a long one, there are three common errors noted during our audits

In guidance issued on March 18, 2011, the U.S. Department of Labor: • extended the enforcement grace period previously provided for some of the new requirements relating to internal claims and appeals that are imposed on group health plans and health insurers under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), and • relaxes in some cases the prior requirement that plans and insurers must be working in good faith to implement the new requirements in order to take advantage of the grace period.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will pump up to $1 billion, funded under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, into a new program to dramatically increase patient safety within two years.

Missouri's Democratic attorney general on Monday joined the largely Republican-led effort to have President Barack Obama's 2010 health care overhaul ruled unconstitutional.

As you might have guessed from my previous posts, I’m more or less in favor of the health care reform mandates, but there are still individual rules I’m concerned about, and some I’m definitely confused about. This post focuses on one such confusing rule--the requirement for payers to use 85% member premiums toward the MLR (Medical Loss Ratio). Simply, payers must spend at least 85% of the amount they collect toward the cost of care.

Two potentially significant issues that were immediately identified by employers about W-2 Form reporting under the health law were how small employers and retiree health care plans would be impacted.