Banco Popular de Puerto Rico

According to a new survey from HighRoads, across employers ranging in size from fewer than 5,000 employees to more than 100,000 employees, 71% of respondents conduct “passive” versus “active” benefits enrollment, thus enabling employees to automatically renew most of their own plans -- not the best strategy, experts say.

Just like I don’t understand people who place sensitivity over salary when it comes to choosing an employer, it’s a mystery to me why anyone would work during a vacation. When I go away on vacation from work, I do just that. I go away. No answering calls, no checking voicemails and if you get an email from me other than my out-of-office reply, it’s either a dire emergency or my inbox has been hacked. …

News today from the Congressional Management Foundation and Society for Human Resource Management reveals that the two organizations next week will launch a new joint research project to better understand the working environment on Capitol Hill — specifically to examine how randomly selected members of Congress juggle their work and home lives and assess congressional staffers’ satisfaction with their workplace.

Recently, I came across a news item from U.S. News & World Report that, based on research from the Society for Human Resource Management, detailed 21 workplace benefits that are rapidly disappearing from view—for a variety of reasons.

Although generally a highly rated and highly valued benefit, one of the most irksome realities of flexible spending accounts is that account holders must drain the funds at the end of every plan year or lose them altogether. However, a bipartisan Senate proposal aims to end the FSA “use it or lose it” rule.

President Ronald Reagan was famously known as the “Great Communicator.” In a commentary for the New York Daily News to mark what would have been Reagan’s 100th birthday, Fred Thompson said Reagan’s reputation as The Great Communicator “boils down to three basic traits: he was simple; he was clear; he was sincere.” …

While lawmakers on both sides of the aisle mostly are teeing off on the "Gang of Six" debt reduction plan’s entitlement cuts and tax hikes, Brian H. Graff, executive director and CEO of The American Society of Pension Professionals & Actuaries, takes issue with the proposal’s cuts to tax deductions for retirement savers.

All this time, I thought it was just retirement plan participants who didn’t understand the fees they were paying. Turns out, according to a recent Spectrem Group study, plan sponsors don’t understand plan fees all that well either.

In a recent EBN podcast with Prescription Solutions’ Patrick Stroh, he outlined a new tool that not only allows benefits professionals to use predicting software to see how much a pharmacy benefit plan would cost by adding in, taking away or tweaking certain elements — network size, copays, etc. — but allows employees to weigh in with their preferences as well. Kind of like giving a 6-year-old a credit card, no?

Given the current status of the bipartisan talks on raising the debt ceiling, I’m not sure how willing to flex and bend congressional leaders are at the moment. Still, I give members of the Society for Human Resource Management credit for trying to stretch lawmakers’ thinking on modernizing the 73-year-old Fair Labor Standards Act to allow employers and employees greater flexibility.