Legislation proposed by the Republicans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, called the American Health Care Act (“AHCA”), repeals most of the taxes that were imposed by the Affordable Care Act on employers, their health plans and employees, such as the employer mandate and 0.9% Medicare surtax. The AHCA would not repeal the Affordable Care Act’s insurance coverage mandates, including the elimination of lifetime and annual dollar limits on essential health benefits or requirements to cover dependent children up to age 26. Below is a summary of the key provisions that would affect employers and their health plans.
Continue Reading The Effect of American Health Care Act on Employers

A new post on Covington’s eHealth blog discusses HIPAA-related provisions in the Twenty-First Century Cures Act, signed by President Obama on December 13.   These provisions direct HHS to consider HIPAA’s effects on mental health treatment and the availability of health data for research purposes.  Read the full post here.
Continue Reading Twenty-First Century Cures Act Includes HIPAA Provisions

Our colleague Jason Levy recently published an article in The Actuary Magazine on the Department of Labor’s fiduciary conflict rule.  More than six years in the making, this rule represents perhaps the most significant regulation from the DOL during the Obama Administration.

The fiduciary conflict rule expands the definition of fiduciary to cover, with certain exceptions, all investment advice provided to a retirement plan (like a 401(k) plan, defined benefit pension plan, or an IRA), or to a participant or beneficiary in any of those retirement plans.  The rule imposes fiduciary status on a broad category of professionals, including many broker-dealers who previously had taken the position that they were not investment advice fiduciaries based on a DOL regulation that had been in place since 1975.

In contrast to the sweeping changes it imposes on investment advice professionals, the fiduciary conflict rule will have a far more modest effect on employers.  The rule is not intended to confer fiduciary status on sponsors of retirement plans.  Likewise, there had been concern under the proposed version of the rule that human resources and other employees who interact with participants might be considered fiduciaries when they discuss retirement plan investments with their co-workers.  However, the final version of the rule provides that, absent unusual circumstances, such employees would not be covered.

Nevertheless, the fiduciary conflict rule has important implications for employers that sponsor retirement plans.Continue Reading What Employers Need to Know About the Fiduciary Conflict Rule

Existing rules in Europe require, and proposed rules in the U.S. would require, companies and financial institutions to have in place effective clawback policies.  Under such policies, employers have the ability to recover compensation paid to employees when certain events occur or information comes to light that could have an adverse effect on the employer.  The aim, of course, is to create a direct link between reward and conduct so as to promote good corporate behavior and ensure effective risk management.

Clawback provisions have been around for a number of years and they are now a fairly well-known feature in a variety of different bonus and equity incentive programs. They often complement other measures that employers can deploy to address adverse events and circumstances, the most common of which is the ability to forfeit or downward adjust unvested compensation. With executive scrutiny and accountability on the rise, the significance of these policies and their effectiveness will undoubtedly be put to the test.  This article looks briefly at the legal and practical challenges companies face at each stage of a clawback policy – from design and implementation to operation and enforcement.Continue Reading Learning to Live with Clawbacks: The New, Long String on Executive Compensation

Long considered to be at the forefront of providing benefits to employees who take family and medical leave, California recently enacted a new law aimed at increasing the benefits paid out to employees who take time off to care for an ill or injured family member or for new child…
Continue Reading California’s Increased Paid Family Leave Benefits and San Francisco’s Paid Parental Leave Ordinance

On January 20, the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) issued new guidance on joint employment under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).  The guidance marks the third time in recent years that WHD has stressed the broad definition of “employment” under the FLSA, following June 2014 guidance on joint employment in the home health care industry and July 2015 guidance on misclassification of employees as independent contractors.  WHD’s consistent focus reiterates that the agency believes that many workers are classified incorrectly and will focus its enforcement activity on these areas.
Continue Reading DOL Issues Guidance on Its Broad View of Joint Employment

As noted in our earlier blog post, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 decision Fifth Third Bancorp v. Dudenhoeffer made clear that participants bringing stock-drop cases are subject to heightened pleading standards to help “divide the plausible sheep from the meritless goats.”

In its first substantive ruling in a post-…
Continue Reading Supreme Court Reiterates High Pleading Bar for Stock Drop Cases

As people head off on their summer breaks, regulators in Europe, particularly Germany, are increasingly focused on the breakdown of the division between home and work life and how this division is changing as mobile devices become used for work-related emails. Regulators are considering new rules that would limit an…
Continue Reading Employees in France and Germany May No Longer Have to Respond to Work-Related Emails Out of Working Hours

On August 5, 2015, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted, by a three-to-two vote, a rule that will require most public companies to disclose, annually, the ratio of the median of the annual total compensation of the company’s employees to the annual total compensation of the company’s principal executive officer.
Continue Reading SEC’s New Pay Ratio Disclosure Rule Explained