California’s Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau has proposed plans to start requiring COVID-19 claims to be included when calculating employer X-Mods, according to a report by an industry trade publication. The proposal, which would have to be approved by the state insurance commissioner, would bring to an end current rules that exclude the impact of…
Employers that plan to or have already introduced incentives or penalties to coax their workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19, have to prepare for likely paperwork and compliance challenges. The Biden administration has made it easier to require employees to get vaccinated after it ordered Fed-OSHA to write regulations mandating that all employers with 100…
Rates for most commercial lines of insurance are likely to continue rising going into 2022, as claims costs mount across the board. A new report from Marketscout notes that rate increases have accelerated across all major lines, but have been most pronounced in liability coverages. The composite rate for commercial insurance pricing in the third…
Commercial property insurance rates are continuing to climb, as the segment faces a number of headwinds that have pushed claims costs to new heights. There are number of factors that are colliding, including the frequency and severity of claims from extreme weather, the cost of rebuilding, rates for commercial properties are not keeping pace with…
The IRS has announced the new affordability requirement test percentage that group health plans must comply with to conform to the Affordable Care Act. Starting in 2022, the cost of self-only group plans offered to workers by employers that are required to comply with the ACA, must not exceed 9.61% of each employee’s household income.…
You may not think of postal delays as a cost of doing business or a risk to your operations, but slower mail can pose a number of issues for timely correspondence and package deliveries. The U.S. is facing the specter of longer delivery times for first class mail, and the longer the mail has to…
With about 75% of employees in the U.S. using their own devices for work communications and productivity, businesses must implement safeguards to avoid company data from being compromised should a device be stolen, hacked or contract a virus. The BYOD (bring your own device) trend has grown as many employees have eschewed company-issued mobile devices,…
With confrontations between angry customers and employees just trying to do their jobs increasing during the COVID-19 pandemic, employers need to make sure they have policies in place to protect workers who are confronted. As well, many customer-facing companies — mainly retailers, restaurants, retail printers and entertainment venues — have seen an uptick in customers…
Many parents get a big surprise when they find out that their health insurance won’t cover their kids when they go off to college, particularly if they are out of state. The problem is that the health plan they may get through work may not have networks in the area or region. If your child…
Employers are being hit with a wave of COVID-19-related employment lawsuits, which is starting to have an effect on employment practices liability insurance (EPLI) rates and coverages. A tally by the law firm of Fisher Phillips found that as of August 2021 there had been 2,950 COVID-19-related employment lawsuits filed in the U.S. Most of…