Employer Strategies

Why trusted advisers should be sharing this growing retirement income strategy with their clients.

Industry musings about how fast this employee benefit selection tool will grow and in what format are plentiful.

Effective in 2015, the Affordable Care Act requires that employers report information about the health coverage they offer to employees. As you plan for ACA compliance, be reminded that you have this reporting obligation, not just to the Internal Revenue Service but to employees as well.

When the public exchanges were first envisioned, some industry analysts thought most employers eventually would head for the exits on financing health benefits and simply steer their employees into the nascent online marketplace. That hasn’t happened, of course, and it’s far too early in the HIX rollout to expect any meaningful change to occur.

While no public exchange was without troubles during the first ACA open-enrollment period, one state in particular put unique efforts into its SHOP component and saw results.

By getting employees more directly engaged in their own financial well-being – educating them on their benefits, helping them make the right retirement planning decisions and learning how to tackle financial stress by addressing their own debt and their worries over health care costs – employers are seeing lower turnover and increased productivity.

A booming 2013 stock market pointed to an increase in corporate growth. But the unpredictable nature of corporate pension assets proved to drag down the total CEO compensation pool for the nation’s largest corporations.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is in the early stages of looking at new vendors to potentially take over operation of Healthcare.gov, when Accenture’s contract expires in January 2015.

Employees are craving voluntary benefits to offset high deductible plans, yet many say they haven’t been offered any new options since the ACA became law.

As companies continue to develop innovative compensation programs for top executives, benefit decision-makers are seeking to fine-tune succession planning and workforce analytics.