Employer Strategies

A fix is in the works to ensure agents and brokers can identify themselves and therefore receive commissions for their work on the federally-facilitated marketplace, an agency official at The Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight said Tuesday.

Initial numbers for 2015 open enrollment put participation in Mercer’s Marketplace exchange at nearly five times the size of 2014 rates. The consulting firm also added 40 additional clients to the exchange who were not previously with Mercer.

Using an electronic, cloud-based system to help with your open enrollment can allow employees to take the extra time to make sure they're getting the most out of your voluntary offerings.

A third of Americans have no retirement savings and those who do aren’t saving enough — automatic escalation can help.

The Pension Protection Act of 2006 has helped to reduce costs and limit liabilities for multiemployer plans. But the landmark legislation will sunset at the end of the year, which has many stakeholders and consultants predicting future retirement uncertainty for the more than 10 million participants in multiemployer plans across the nation.

A benefits manager may assume that health care coverage and insurance needs are easily covered as employees head off to international worksites, but preparing for accidents - or the complexity of global insurance rules - requires some extra forethought.

Given the past high-profile data security breaches at large retailers Target and Home Depot, legal officials maintain there may be more at stake for employers and benefit managers when lapses occur in health care provider systems.

A couple weeks into the post-Bill Gross PIMCO era, plan sponsors may be interested in learning what other plan sponsors are doing with their PIMCO funds in their retirement plans.

The quality of Form 5500 reporting depends entirely on whether benefit managers and plan fiduciaries select qualified auditors and service providers, says Ian Dingwall, chief accountant for the DOL's Employee Benefits Security Administration, speaking this week during the International Foundation for Employee Benefit Plans' annual conference in Boston.

A new broker-friendly private exchange is launching that will allow employees at companies with less than 50 lives to buy health insurance using pre-tax dollars.