The Cal/OSHA Standards Board has relented to threats from Federal OSHA and voted to align its residential construction and roofing fall-protection trigger with its federal counterpart at 6 feet. California has been the only state that runs its own OSHA and not comply with the federal mandate that requires laborers working at heights of more…
Middle class families — those with incomes of between roughly $50,000 and $100,000 per year — are becoming increasingly reliant on workplace benefits to ensure their financial well-being in case of a disability or critical illness. Simple health insurance is insufficient to carry the load. The loss of a breadwinner’s or caregiver’s financial contribution through…
By now you should be prepared and ready to go for your 2025 policy year employee benefits open enrollment. You should have all your plan documents and have prepared or held presentations for your staff to explain the benefits package and any major changes to plans that you offer. Employees should be familiar with how…
Organizations around the world lose an estimated 5% of their annual revenues to occupational fraud, according to a survey by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE). The association estimates that U.S. businesses lose some $50 billion a year to employee theft, and that 75% of employees have stolen at least once from their employer…
A new study has found three out of four U.S. workers would accept a job with a slightly lower salary if it offered better health care and medical coverage. The main driver in workers prioritizing benefits is the rapidly rising cost of group health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs, according to the study by Voya…
Are you due for a workers’ compensation premium audit? Audits are how insurance rates are determined, and it’s possible that an audit will uncover information that can actually save you money — or not if you’ve hired additional staff and haven’t notified your insurer. In any case, it pays to be prepared by taking on…
With 2025 just a few months away, it’s important that small employers understand their group health insurance reporting obligations under the Affordable Care Act as they changed at the start of 2024. Before 2024, only employers that sent out 250 or more Forms 1094-B/1095-B and 1094-C/1095-C were required to file them online with the IRS.…
Lately there’s been a series of massive cyberattacks on software that organizations use to run their businesses, causing major disruptions to companies — and sometimes hamstringing their ability to operate. The most recent example is the Crowdstrike cyber-security software outage that affected some 8.5 million businesses, most notably airlines, which had to cancel thousands of…
The IRS has significantly increased the group health plan affordability threshold — which is used to determine if an employer’s lowest-premium health plan complies with the Affordable Care Act rules — for plan years starting in 2025. The threshold for next year has been set at 9.02% of an employee’s household income, up from 8.39%…
A common problem in the transportation industry is fleet managers failing to report accidents that their drivers are involved in, or the drivers themselves failing to report them in the first place. The risk is that if you ignore this problem, it’s not going away and will instead likely come back to haunt you, particularly…