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Despite the drive to make all things digital during the 2010 open enrollment season, employers didn't turn away from good, old-fasioned face-to-face meetings. Also, complying with the first phase of the health law was a breeze.

Big bucks are at stake in a new wellness program for employers.

As a CPA with 20+ years of experience, I'm a big supporter of accountability and company audits. (See a related story on page 10 on benefit plan audits.) Early in my career as an auditor, I made a living by ensuring companies said what they did and did what they said. The Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70: Service Organizations, commonly known as the SAS 70, has been an industry staple since its issuance in 1992 and a requisite for service providers to test internal controls.

Today, it's not uncommon for an employer to offer more than 10 independent employee benefit packages. The problem is that engagement in ancillary benefits tends to be low. Employees may not know how to access them or even that they exist, due to the complexity and inconvenience of having to access each benefit separately.

Not complying with current law can be expensive in today's legal climate. Thus, employers should review their employee handbooks and employment-related policies to make sure they are up to date. More importantly, though, employers should draft their handbooks so their employees actually read them and follow their policies.

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

Some employers are investing more time and resources to find out whether workers are tobacco-free and in the process are rewarding those who pass muster with lower health premiums or financial rewards.

The final IRS 403(b) regulations introduced a number of new requirements for plan sponsors, the most significant of which clearly designates the plan sponsor as ultimately accountable for the plan's proper administration. To effectively administrate their organization's retirement plan, sponsors need to gather information from their plan's providers and examine and implement procedures for routinely acquiring plan information.

In just the last week, two professionals — one in the wellness industry, the other a benefits practitioner like yourselves — have told me that starting wellness programs can be cheap, incentives are unnecessary and HRAs are flawed and in fact, can be dangerous for your wellness efforts. Cue the Twilight Zone theme song.

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.