"Who has to pay for COBRA coverage?" is a question we often hear from transaction lawyers and their clients in a stock sale or an asset sale. COBRA requires some employers to provide certain participants and their beneficiaries with group health plan coverage after certain events occur that ...
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Form 5500: Are You Sure You Are Filing All That Are Required?
Advice on how and when to file Form 5500…
How can filing an annual return/report on a Form 5500, a relatively simple information return that does not require the payment of any taxes, become so complicated and result in such huge penalties for noncompliance? The answer lies in the complex filing ...
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Health Reimbursement Arrangement Can Be Used To Convert Unused Vacation And Other Leave Into Nontaxable Welfare Benefits
In the employee benefits arena, employers and advisors are often looking for ways to convert taxable wages or benefits into nontaxable benefits. One method that the IRS has recently recognized involves an employer's adoption of a "health reimbursement arrangement" (HRA) and then "converting" what ...
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Health Care Reform: Are You A “Large” Employer
A large employer is one that for a year employed an average of at least 50 full-time employees (at least 30 hours per week) on business days during the preceding calendar year. In order to make this determination, the employer must not only count all of its full-time employees, it must count the ...
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Employee Aggregation Rules: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
First In A Series
It was not a dark and stormy night--at least it didn't start out that way. Instead, it was a sunny and calm afternoon, and a routine year-end review meeting was taking place between the owners of SMALLCO (a manufacturing business), their accountant and their retirement plan ...
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Employee Aggregation Rules: Controlled Groups
Second In A Series
In our last episode we left our heroes spending a dark and stormy night arguing about who screwed up and failed to recognize that SMALLCO and SMALL Vineyards had to be considered one employer for employee benefit plan purposes.
SMALLCO and SMALL Vineyards were ...
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Employee Aggregation Rules: Affiliated Service Groups
Third In A Series
In the first two installments of this series on the aggregation of employers and employees, we spent a dark and stormy night with the owners of SMALLCO and SMALL Vineyards and their advisors learning about the controlled group rules and why the employees of the two businesses ...
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Employee Aggregation Rules: Leased Employees
Fourth And Final (Whew!!) Of A Series
In our first three action-packed episodes on the aggregation of employers and employees, we spent a dark and stormy night with the owners of SMALLCO and SMALL Vineyards and their advisors learning about the steamy world of controlled group rules. We ...
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Affordable Care Act Compliance: The DOL Is Auditing
The Department of Labor (DOL) appears to be focusing its scrutiny on welfare benefit plans in response to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA). Now that Obamacare implementation is well underway, practitioners have begun seeing a shift in the audit letters that plans ...
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