To help protect people from identity theft, the Internal Revenue Service has issued a final rule that will allow employers to shorten Social Security numbers (SSNs) or alternative taxpayer identification numbers (TINs) on Form W-2 wage and tax statements that are distributed to employees, beginning in 2021.
The IRS published the new rule in the Federal Register on July 3. It finalizes a proposed rule issued in September 2017 with no substantive changes.
Under the regulation, SSNs or other TINs can be masked with the first five digits of the nine-digit number replaced with asterisks or XXXs in the following formats:
To ensure that accurate wage information is reported to the IRS and the Social Security Administration (SSA), the rule does not permit truncated TINs on W-2 forms sent to those agencies. The IRS said that instructions to W-2 forms will be updated to reflect these regulations and explained that masking the numbers on employees’ forms is not mandatory.
The IRS already allows employers to use truncated TINs on employees’ Form 1095-C for Affordable Care Act reporting and on certain other tax-related statements distributed to employees.
The IRS delayed the applicability date of the final rule to apply to W-2 forms that are required to be furnished to employees after Dec. 31, 2020, “so employers still have time to decide whether to implement the change,” according to attorneys at Washington, D.C., law firm Covington & Burling. “The delayed effective date is intended to allow states and local governments time to update their rules to permit the use of truncated TINs, if they do not already do so,” the attorneys wrote.
Permitting employers to truncate Social Security numbers on Forms W-2 provided to employees will better protect individuals’ sensitive personal information.
But some fear that the change could hamper accurate reporting to government agencies. Concerns have been raised that employees who already receive masked pay statements will have no means of ensuring that their SSN is entered (and subsequently reported to the SSA and IRS) correctly. According to the SSA website, a SSN correction is a common error and even if an SSN is ‘verified,’ it could still be entered into payroll software incorrectly. The W2 provides a means for the employee to catch that mistake.
The IRS responded that the benefits of allowing employers to protect their employees from identity theft by truncating employees’ SSNs outweighed the risks of unintended consequences, and that many of the potential consequences noted by the commenters could be mitigated by using other methods to verify a taxpayer’s identity and the accuracy of the taxpayers’ information.
Some believe the new rule does not go far enough by making truncated Social Security numbers or other TINs an option rather than a requirement. W-2 forms have been the target of several high-profile breaches, and therefore the IRS should only permit truncated SSNs to protect employees from future breaches according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.
The EEOC’s website now provides information employers may need for filing Component 2 data, such as a sample form, an instruction booklet and FAQs for covered employers. The agency confirmed that the Component 2 online filing system will be available July 15, and additional instructions will come soon. The agency also will send login information to covered employers through the U.S. Postal Service and by e‑mail.
The EEOC uses information about the number of women and minorities companies employ to support civil rights enforcement and analyze employment patterns, according to the agency.
Under Component 2, employers must report wage information from Box 1 of the W‑2 forms and total hours worked for all employees, categorized by race, ethnicity and sex, within 12 proposed pay ranges.
“Employers may not use gross annual earnings instead of W-2 Box 1 earnings,” noted Kiosha Dickey, an attorney with Ogletree Deakins in Columbia, S.C., and Jay Patton, an attorney with Ogletree Deakins in Birmingham, Ala.
The report should show actual hours worked by nonexempt employees, an estimated 20 hours worked per week for part-time exempt employees, and 40 hours worked per week for full-time exempt employees.
As with Component 1 data, employers should select a pay period between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31 of the reporting year as the “workforce snapshot period” for Component 2 data, the agency guidance said.
“The only employees whose compensation and hours-worked data must be reported are those full- and part-time employees who were on the employer’s payroll during the workforce snapshot period,” Dickey and Patton explained.
The federal government initially halted plans to collect pay data so it could review the appropriateness of the revised EEO-1 form under the Paperwork Reduction Act.
The worker advocacy groups that filed the lawsuit said the information would help them evaluate pay disparities and better serve their clients. Furthermore, requiring equal-pay data collection would “encourage companies to identify and correct pay disparities and allow the EEOC to more effectively and efficiently root out and address pay discrimination,” they argued.
Business groups, however, have opposed the requirement. “The EEOC’s pay-data collection rule creates another administrative burden for companies while raising questions about how the data will be used and analyzed,” said Brett Coburn, an attorney with Alston & Bird in Atlanta.
“Employers in today’s environment are acutely aware of the gender wage gap and recognize the importance of ensuring compliance with applicable federal and state requirements,” he said. “Without formal guidance on how the EEOC will assess and publish the data, the only certainty is that this new rule will create opportunities for litigation.”
Many feel that HR professionals can and should start preparing for expanded EEO-1 reporting now.
HR professionals should identify where employee pay and hour data are stored and begin gathering that information or figuring out how to extract it, he said.
Once all data is collected, employers should then tackle the task of filling out the actual form and may even want to check with vendors (i.e. HRIS or payroll vendors) to see if they can assist with the process.
Employers will report data through the Component 2 EEO-1 online filing system or by creating a data file and inputting their data in the appropriate fields in accordance with the data file specifications, but the data file specifications have not yet been released.
Advocates claim a newly issued regulation could transform how employers pay for employee health care coverage.
On June 13, the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and the Treasury issued a final rule allowing employers of all sizes that do not offer a group coverage plan to fund a new kind of health reimbursement arrangement (HRA), known as an individual coverage HRA (ICHRA). The departments also posted FAQs on the new rule.
Starting Jan. 1, 2020, employees will be able to use employer-funded ICHRAs to buy individual-market insurance, including insurance purchased on the public exchanges formed under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Under IRS guidance from the Obama administration (IRS Notice 2013-54), employers were effectively prevented from offering stand-alone HRAs that allow employees to purchase coverage on the individual market.
“Using an individual coverage HRA, employers will be able to provide their workers and their workers’ families with tax-preferred funds to pay all or a portion of the cost of coverage that workers purchase in the individual market,” said Joe Grogan, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. “The departments estimate that once employers fully adjust to the new rules, roughly 800,000 employers will offer individual coverage HRAs to pay for insurance for more than 11 million employees and their family members, providing them with more options for selecting health insurance coverage that better meets their needs.”
The new rule “is primarily about increasing employer flexibility and worker choice of coverage,” said Brian Blase, special assistant to the president for health care policy. “We expect this rule to particularly benefit small employers and make it easier for them to compete with larger businesses by creating another option for financing worker health insurance coverage.”
The final rule is in response to the Trump administration’s October 2017 executive order on health care choice and competition, which resulted in an earlier final rule on association health plans that is now being challenged in the courts, and a final rule allowing low-cost short-term insurance that provides less coverage than a standard ACA plan.
New Types of HRAs
Existing HRAs are employer-funded accounts that employees can use to pay out-of-pocket health care expenses but may not use to pay insurance premiums. Unlike health savings accounts (HSAs), all HRAs, including the new ICHRA, are exclusively employer-funded, and, when employees leave the organization, their HRA funds go back to the employer. This differs from HSAs, which are employee-owned and portable when employees leave.
The proposed regulations keep the kinds of HRAs currently permitted (such as HRAs integrated with group health plans and retiree-only HRAs) and would recognize two new types of HRAs:
What ICHRAs Can Do
Under the new HRA rule:
The rule also includes a disclosure provision to help ensure that employees understand the type of HRA being offered by their employer and how the ICHRA offer may make them ineligible for a premium tax credit or subsidy when buying an ACA exchange-based plan. To help satisfy the notice requirements, the IRS issued an Individual Coverage HRA Model Notice.
QSEHRAs and ICHRAs
Currently, qualified small-employer HRAs (QSEHRAs), created by Congress in December 2016, allow small businesses with fewer than 50 full-time employees to use pretax dollars to reimburse employees who buy nongroup health coverage. The new rule goes farther and:
The legislation creating QSEHRAs set a maximum annual contribution limit with inflation-based adjustments. In 2019, annual employer contributions to QSEHRAs are capped at $5,150 for a single employee and $10,450 for an employee with a family.
The new rule, however, doesn’t cap contributions for ICHRAs.
As a result, employers with fewer than 50 full-time employees will have two choices—QSEHRAs or ICHRAs—with some regulatory differences between the two. For example:
“QSEHRAs have a special rule that allows employees to qualify for both their employer’s subsidy and the difference between that amount and any premium tax credit for which they’re eligible,” said John Barkett, director of policy affairs at consultancy Willis Towers Watson.
While the ability of employees to couple QSEHRAs with a premium tax credit is appealing, the downside is QSEHRA’s annual contribution limits, Barkett said. “QSEHRA’s are limited in their ability to fully subsidize coverage for older employees and employees with families, because employers could run through those caps fairly quickly,” he noted.
For older employees, the least expensive plan available on the individual market could easily cost $700 a month or $8,400 a year, Barkett pointed out, and “with a QSEHRA, an employer could only put in around $429 per month to stay under the $5,150 annual limit for self-only coverage.”
Similarly, for employees with many dependents, premiums could easily exceed the QSEHRA’s family coverage maximum of $10,450, whereas “all those dollars could be contributed pretax through an ICHRA,” Barkett said.
An Excepted-Benefit HRA
In addition to allowing ICHRAs, the final rule creates a new excepted-benefit HRA that lets employers that offer traditional group health plans provide an additional pretax $1,800 per year (indexed to inflation after 2020) to reimburse employees for certain qualified medical expenses, including premiums for vision, dental, and short-term, limited-duration insurance.
The new excepted-benefit HRAs can be used by employees whether or not they enroll in a traditional group health plan, and can be used to reimburse employees’ COBRA continuation coverage premiums and short-term insurance coverage plan premiums.
Safe Harbor Coming
With ICHRAs, employers still must satisfy the ACA’s affordability and minimum value requirements, just as they must do when offering a group health plan. However, “the IRS has signaled it will come out with a safe harbor that should make it straightforward for employers to determine whether their ICHRA offering would comply with ACA coverage requirements,” Barkett said.
Last year, the IRS issued Notice 2018-88, which outlined proposed safe harbor methods for determining whether individual coverage HRAs meet the ACA’s affordability threshold for employees, and which stated that ICHRAs that meet the affordability standard will be deemed to offer at least minimum value.
The IRS indicated that further rulemaking on these safe harbor methods is on its agenda for later this year.
The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) fee for 2018 is due by July 31, 2019. For groups whose plan year ended December 31, 2018 this will be the final PCORI payment they will have to make. Health plans whose plan year ended after December 31, 2018, but before October 1, 2019, will still have one final PCORI payment that will be due by July 31, 2020.
The PCORI fee is imposed under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on issuers of certain health insurance policies and self-insured health plan sponsors to help fund the research institute. The fee amount is based on the average number of covered lives under the policy or plan, and the total (along with the fee) must be reported annually on the second quarter IRS Form 720 (Quarterly Federal Excise Tax Return) and paid by July 31. The fee due July 31, 2019 is calculated as $2.45 per covered life. Plan sponsors must pay the PCORI fee by July 31 of the calendar year immediately following the calendar year in which the plan year ends.
For fully insured health plans, the insurance carrier files Form 720 and pays the PCORI fee. So, employers with fully insured health plans have no filing requirement (but will be charged by the carrier for the fee). Employers that sponsor self-insured health plans are responsible for filing Form 720 and paying their due PCORI fee. For self-insured plans with multiple employers, the named plan sponsor is generally required to file Form 720.
The fee may not be paid from plan assets, so it must be paid out of the sponsor’s general assets. According to the IRS, however, the fee is a tax-deductible business expense for employers with self-insured plans.Late May 2019, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced the 2020 limits for contributions to Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and limits for High Deductible Health Plans (HDHPs). These inflation adjustments are provided for under Internal Revenue Code Section 223.
For the 2020 calendar year, an HDHP is a health plan with an annual deductible that is not less than $1,400 for self-only coverage and $2,800 for family coverage. 2020 annual out-of-pocket expenses (deductibles, copayments and other amounts, excluding premiums) cannot exceed $6,900 for self-only coverage and $13,800 for family coverage.
For individuals with self-only coverage under an HDHP, the 2020 annual contribution limit to an HSA is $3,550 and for an individual with family coverage, the HSA contribution limit is $7,100.
No change was announced to the HSA catch-up contribution limit. If an individual is age 55 or older by the end of the calendar year, he or she can contribute an additional $1,000 to his or her HSA. If married and both spouses are age 55, each individual can contribute an additional $1,000 into his or her individual account.
For married couples that have family coverage where both spouses are over age 55, each spouse can take advantage of the $1,000 catch-up, but in order to get the full $9,100 contribution, they will need to use two accounts. The contribution cannot be maximized with only one account. One individual would contribute the family coverage maximum plus his or her individual catch-up, and the other would contribute the catch-up maximum to his or her individual account.
In a recent article released by SHRM, it states in a recent survey of U.S. adults that 60% of male managers have admitted they are uncomfortable mentoring, working alone with or socializing with a female colleague in light of the #MeToo movement.
That’s an increase of 14 percentage points from last year when SurveyMonkey and LeanIn.org conducted a similar national online poll.
And another SurveyMonkey poll, conducted in March, found that senior men are 12 times more likely to hesitate to have a work dinner with a junior-level female colleague than with a junior-level male colleague and five times more likely to hesitate to travel on business with a junior-level woman.
But women need men’s support to advance in the workplace, according to LeanIn.org, the Sheryl Sandberg and Dave Goldberg Family Foundation.”If fewer men mentor women, fewer women will rise to leadership. As long as this imbalance of power remains, women and other marginalized groups are at greater risk of being overlooked, undermined, and harassed,” LeanIn.org says on its website.
A 2018 Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey & Co. noted that women receive less day-to-day support and less access to senior leaders than men, impeding their career growth. “Employees who interact regularly with senior leaders are more likely to ask for and receive promotions, stay at their companies, and aspire to be leaders,” the report authors wrote.
SHRM Online compiled the following articles from its archives and other respected sources on the importance of men supporting their female colleagues’ career growth.
Wall Street Rule for the #MeToo Era: Avoid Women at All Cost
No more dinners with female colleagues. Don’t sit next to them on flights. Book hotel rooms on different floors. Avoid one-on-one meetings. In fact, as a wealth adviser put it, just hiring a woman these days is “an unknown risk.” What if she took something he said the wrong way?
Across Wall Street, men are adopting controversial strategies for the #MeToo era and, in the process, making life even harder for women.
(Bloomberg)
A Chilling Effect of #MeToo in Academic Medicine
The movement is scaring off male academics from mentoring women, according to commentary penned by six Canadian scientists—all women working in the fields of medical research and education.
Mentoring in medical circles is a big deal, with academic doctors having a “professional and moral obligation to mentor the next generation of medical professionals,” the commentary says.
Not doing so would have serious consequences on a woman’s career trajectory, said Sophie Soklaridis, the commentary’s lead author and a scientist at the Toronto-based Centre of Addiction and Mental Health.
“When women are not on the radar, it limits their opportunities for these kinds of advancements.”
(CBC News)
Viewpoint: The Number of Men Who Are Uncomfortable Mentoring Women Is Growing
#MeToo has shaken up the workplace. Good—it needed shaking up. A safer workplace for women is a better workplace for everyone. Still, we have a long way to go before the workplace is truly equal. To get there, we need men to support women’s careers.
We wish we could say that more men are stepping up for women. In fact, the opposite appears to be happening. This is disastrous. If they’re reluctant even to meet one-on-one with women, there’s no way women can get an equal shot at proving themselves. Instead, women will be overlooked and excluded, which is a terrible waste of talent, creativity, and productivity. It’s not good for business or for anyone.
(Fortune)
The Surprising Benefits When Men Mentor Women
“There are benefits on both sides when men mentor women,” said David Smith, PhD., co-author of Athena Rising: How and Why Men Should Mentor Women (Routledge, 2018). “Women get more raises, they advance faster, and they stay in the organization longer. That’s not because men are better mentors, but because they have positions of influence and power. It’s a numbers game. Men get increased access to information, they build a more diverse and expansive network, and they tend to increase their interpersonal skills.”
(Inc.)
Putting Humanity into HR Compliance: During #MeToo Movement, Replace Avoidance with Common Sense
An unfortunate consequence of the #MeToo movement is that some male executives and managers say they now try to avoid female colleagues in the workplace.
The closed-door meeting that bosses won’t have with their direct reports signals a lack of trust. The business meals that supervisors avoid sharing with lower-level employees result in lost opportunities for mentoring, coaching and developing stronger working relationships. Not traveling on the client visit or business trip impairs a mentee’s ability to build his or her network and gain valuable experience.
(SHRM Online)
Advice for Men Who Are Nervous About Mentoring Women
Many senior male managers reportedly are responding to the #MeToo movement with a better-safe-than-sorry attitude and are pulling back from mentoring women. But if we want more women leaders, we need men in powerful positions to support their ascension.
Here are five suggestion on how men should approach mentoring in today’s workplace.
(Harvard Business Review)
Tips for Managers
Closing the gender leadership gap is an imperative for organizations that want to perform at the highest levels. Leveraging the full talents of the population provides a competitive advantage; companies with more women in leadership roles perform better, and employees on diverse and inclusive teams put in more effort, stay longer, and demonstrate more commitment. To change the numbers, gender bias and stereotypes have to be understood and counteracted.
(LeanIn.Org)
National Mentoring Resource Center
The National Mentoring Resource Center provides a collection of mentoring handbooks, curricula, manuals, and other resources that practitioners can use to implement and further develop program practices. This growing collection of resources have all been reviewed by the National Mentoring Resource Center Research Board. Most items are directly available for download here or elsewhere online.
(National Mentoring Resource Center)
The Social Security Administration (SSA) recently resurrected its practice of issuing Employer Correction Request notices – also known as “no-match letters” – when it receives employee information from an employer that does not match its records. If you find yourself in receipt of such a letter, it is recommended that you take the following seven steps as well as considering consulting your legal counsel.
Step 1: Understand The Letter
The first and perhaps most obvious step is to read the letter carefully and understand what it says. Too often employers rush into action before taking the time to read and understand the no-match letter.
(more…)
Employers cannot permit employees to use PTO or other paid leave prior to using unpaid FMLA leave for an FMLA qualifying condition, according to a new Department of Labor Opinion Letter. The Opinion Letter also provides that employers cannot designate more than 12 weeks of leave per year as FMLA (or 26 weeks per year if leave qualifies as FMLA military caregiver leave).
Under the FMLA, covered employers must provide eligible employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job and benefit-protected leave per year for qualifying medical or family reasons (or up to 26 weeks per year for qualifying military caregiver leave). The Opinion Letter addresses the situation where an employee anticipates a leave of absence for an FMLA-qualifying reason and the employee wants to take off more than the 12 weeks allotted under the FMLA by using other available paid leave policies (such as vacation, sick pay, PTO, etc.) at their disposal. Under this scenario, the employee notifies the employer that he or she plans to exhaust an available paid leave policy first for an FMLA-qualifying reason, and then after that time has run out, he or she desires to take the 12 weeks of FMLA leave.
(more…)