Social Security Announces 5.8 Percent Benefit Increase for 2009

Monthly Social Security and Supplemental Security Income benefits for more than 55 million Americans will increase 5.8 percent in 2009, the Social Security Administration announced today. The 5.8 percent increase is the largest since 1982.

Social Security and Supplemental Security Income benefits increase automatically each year based on the rise in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), from the third quarter of the prior year to the corresponding period of the current year. This year's increase in the CPI-W was 5.8 percent.

The 5.8 percent Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) will begin with benefits that over 50 million Social Security beneficiaries receive in January 2009. Increased payments to more than 7 million Supplemental Security Income beneficiaries will begin on December 31.

Some other changes that take effect in January of each year are based on the increase in average wages. Based on that increase, the maximum amount of earnings subject to the Social Security tax (taxable maximum) will increase to $106,800 from $102,000. Of the estimated 164 million workers who will pay Social Security taxes in 2009, about 11 million will pay higher taxes as a result of the increase in the taxable maximum.

http://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/pr/2009cola-pr.htm

Offsite HR versus Professional Employer Organization

Published by Bruce Silver
Employers Rx LLC
September 29, 2008

Many business owners have asked me to explain the difference between an Off-Site Human Resource Organization (HRO) and a Professional Employer Organization (PEO), also referred to as employee leasing companies. While most of my clients could care less what the solution is called, so long as we resolve their problem, there are clear differences between these two classifications.

When considering whether you should select an HR outsourcing provider or contracting with a Professional Employer Organization, it is extremely important for business owners and managers to identify the weak links with their employee management and human resource administration. Ask yourself, how can we make our company more competitive? What areas of employee administration can be delivered more efficiently? Are your human resource policies and procedures up-to-date. Are you protecting yourself from frivolous lawsuits by adhering to the myriad of federal, state, and local employment rules and regulations? Are you attracting the best employees by providing a competitive benefits program at affordable rates?

There are four key areas to examine when comparing which employee management solution is best suited for your small or mid-size company. The first area looks into the vendor relationship by examining the roles and the responsibilities of each party under each contract. The second area explores the different services you can expect to receive from each solution provider. Next, we will delve into the various service models, and the different ways that services are delivered, their flexibility, and ways it "touches" your management and employees. Finally, we examine market availability, suitability, and a range of costs or savings you could expect.

We will focus in on each of these four areas in detail with a series of posts to follow. The series will offer our insights on an HR Outsourcing industry that often uses confusing and contradictory definitions and terms to describe similar services. Return often to learn about industry leaders, what sets them apart, and why. We will identify the types and levels of professional services that are best suited for your company's size and budget.

We hope you will join us.

More information is available at Employers-Rx.com

Employers Rx Founder Bruce Silver is Featured PEO Expert for HR World Webinar

Bruce Silver, founder of employee management consulting firm Employers Rx LLC will be the featured guest speaker for a webinar presented by HR World.com on September 25th, 2008. Entitled “7 Ways to Effectively Run a Growing Company in a Slowing Economy” the webinar will focus on ways that small and midsize companies can survive the current economic downturn and prepare for the coming recovery. This informative webinar will look into specific areas where a Professional Employer Organization or PEO can help business owners and entrepreneurs to reduce costs and maximize their human capital investments.

Visitors joining the webinar will learn the top 7 ways to "take the headache" out of effectively running a growing company using a complete Professional Employer Organization (PEO) solution, including:

• Payroll Processing
• Health & Welfare Benefits Administration
• Workers compensation coverage
• Mitigating & Reducing Compliance Risk
• Outsourcing HR Administration - The Pros & Cons
• Improvements you can make to stabilize & control costs
• Plus much more...

Joining Bruce on the webinar will be HR World Editor and Senior Editorial Director Owen Linderholm and Doug Leonard, Vice President of Marketing for Gevity HR, one of the nation’s leading HR Outsourcing companies who is sponsoring this event.

HR World is a leading resource for HR professionals. The site provides in-depth content that HR professionals at small, medium and large companies need to make key decisions. The site provides original content covering news, events and information relevant to HR professionals. HR World is a trusted source for human resource managers and buyers.

Join industry experts to see how a PEO can enable you and your company to focus on saving costs while boosting employee performance and satisfaction. Employers Rx is proud to be a part of this informative and timely subject. The webinar will enlighten HR managers and decision makers to the many ways that partnering with a Professional Employer Organization can help their small and midsize company weather the storm and prepare for brighter days. Attendees can register at the Employers Rx website by clicking on the link at http://employers-rx.com/solutions.php.

Aon Puts a Favorable Spin on Health Insurance Increases

Aon Corporation, the world's 2nd largest insurance broker released their latest survey on projected "health care" costs for 2009. An increase of only 10.6%. So what would you expect the headline to be.

HEALTH INSURANCE RATES GOING UP AGAIN.

Well not exactly. How about ....

HEALTH CARE COSTS TREND DOWN

Don't be fooled by the industry "Spin". Small business owners and mid-size companies should be prepared to experience another round of double digit rate increases again this year. Just like your experience last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.

Aon Consulting's U.S. Health & Benefits practice director, John Zern, said of the survey results: "While the medical trend rate is still more than twice the consumer price index, it is encouraging to see that health care cost rate increases are continuing to slow down. This is a step in the right direction for companies nationwide that continue to feel significant health care price pressures."

Bill Sharon, senior VP of Aon Consulting and director of the study attributes the decrease in the medical trend rate to more employers and employees taking advantage of wellness, health promotion and consumer driven programs.

"Unlike some other healthcare trend surveys, Aon Consulting's survey reports the expected future increase in employer-provided health plan claims cost before any plan changes, based on the opinions of health plan actuaries. We provide this trend data to help employers evaluate the competitiveness of health insurance premium renewals. For employers with self-funded health plans, this trend data helps them (and their actuaries) develop future claim estimates for budgeting purposes."

This is "double speak" for let us see where we can cut your benefits this year. Once again, the insurance company will pay less of the claim (if any), employees will pay more, and the employer still gets socked for an increase in premiums, only not as much as last year. Sound familiar?

If your a business owner, employer or manager and you want to escape the annual treadmill or health insurance rate increases .... than you should consider the services of a Professional Employer Organization

PEO-quote.com offers a free guide that helps entrepreneurs and busy executives find out about the many solutions that employee leasing, HR outsourcing, and professional employer organizations can provide the small and midsize company. Take the time to learn what some of the industry leaders can do for you. You owe it to yourself, and to your employees.

Too busy, then call on the services of a consultant that specializes in employee leasing, and the HRO and PEO industry. Business owners can have their questions about employee leasing and professional organizations answered by experienced professionals at Employers Rx LLC.

Employee Leasing Scams

Employee Leasing Scams - Buyer Beware.

This article highlights what can go wrong when signing up your small or midsize business with an employee leasing company or professional employer organization without doing your homework. The damage done (and potential liability) by not performing the proper due diligence can have a devastating effect

After almost 6 years, prosecutors are finally bringing to justice (after appeals) 3 more individuals whose audacity and greed ruined the lives of business owners and their employees in Florida, New Jersey, New York and the Midwest.

The Florida Times-Union
By Paul Pinkham

Judge sentences business men to prison

Three business owners who cheated millions of U.S. workers out of insurance benefits were sentenced to a total of 55 years in prison by a Jacksonville judge Thursday in what one investigator called Florida's biggest insurance fraud case. U.S. District Judge Virginia Hernandez Covington also ordered the men to forfeit $75 million in assets to the government to partially repay their victims. She said she was "repulsed" by the crimes and hopes the sentences send a message to the business community that fraud won't be tolerated.

Greed got the better of you," Covington told the defendants, all in their 50s.

In February, after a five-week trial, jurors convicted Donald Edward Touchet, Richard E. Standridge and Robert J. Jennings of mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. Prosecutors said the men used sham insurance companies to defraud tens of thousands of small business owners into paying premiums for nonexistent workers comp coverage. Five of the victimized businesses were in Jacksonville. As a result, millions of workers were left without insurance, and some suffered catastrophic financial setbacks, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Devereaux. They included a Missouri man who lost both legs in a construction accident and was only able to get one replaced because the insurance, which he thought he had, never paid for the first one. Another victim, a Lake Butler trucker, suffered brain damage from a job accident but got no salary or hospitalization benefits. He lost his home and his marriage, according to trial testimony.

Covington sentenced Touchet, 54, of El Cajon, Calif., to 22 years in prison and ordered him to forfeit $35 million and property in San Diego County, Calif., to the government. Standridge, 59, a Tempe, Ariz., physician, was sentenced to 18 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $19 million, a $400,000 bank account and four vehicles. Jennings, 59, of Danville, Ill., was sentenced to 15 years and ordered to forfeit $21 million, property in Danville and a motor vehicle. He is dying of cancer, his lawyer said.

Fourteen people have been convicted in the insurance scam, which FBI Special Agent Doug Mathews called the biggest ever in Florida. A 15th defendant is at large in England, and another died while under investigation. Devereaux said prosecutors are proceeding with forfeiture against his New Jersey employee leasing company. The national FBI investigation spun out of the Jacksonville prosecution of Thomas King, president of the Jacksonville employee leasing firm Miralink Group, which collapsed in 2002. King is serving a 14-year sentence. Touchet owned a California employee leasing firm, Jennings ran an administrative services company and Standridge operated several medical corporations. They provided the administrative functions of the sham insurance that King and others purchased, Devereaux said.

In court Thursday, the three men claimed to have been victims themselves, but Covington didn't buy it. "I don't think this had to do with being naive," she said. "I think this had to do with being greedy." Although all three said they sympathized with the victims, Devereaux said their actions and testimony at trial show differently. "You don't get any more serious of a white-collar crime," he told Covington. "This is almost like an Enron where people's life savings are gone, and they [the defendants] just don't care. ... The amount of loss here is absolutely tremendous."

The defendants plan to appeal.

Legislators Mull Professional Employer Organizations

Regulating employee leasing companies and professional employer organizations can be a formidable task. Elected officials of West Virginia's Government Organization Subcommittee C is learning just how difficult it can be. Mannix Porterfield, a reporter with the Register-Herald, provides us with an insight into examining the operations of these companies.

This article makes a strong case why business owners and executives should seek professional advice when considering the selection of an Employee Leasing, HR Outsourcing, or Professional Employer Organization for their company.

Legislators Mull Professional Employer Organizations

By Mannix Porterfield
Register - Herald

An emergency rule is coming in mid-June to govern how Professional Employer Organizations align with workers’ compensation coverage, but other issues affecting them don’t end there. In fact, based on Sunday’s discussion by Government Organization Subcommittee C, lawmakers had best plan on looking at PEOs during interims for the rest of the year. Taxes, labor laws and unemployment compensation are all matters the panel plans to look at, Sen. Evan Jenkins, D-Cabell, a co-chairman, assured members. Until last year, there was no regulation of the growing business, and it was the PEO industry itself that called on lawmakers for some standards.

“They are worried, in part, about the image an unscrupulous entity that would act like a PEO but not really be a PEO, and come in and spoil what an appropriately formed and structured PEO may do,” Jenkins said. Insurance Commissioner Jane Cline told the panel her office intends to file an emergency workers’ compensation rule governing PEOs with the secretary of state’s office next month. “The issue of health insurance coverage seems to be a big concern,” Cline said. Cline recalled “a disastrous situation” that occurred with a PEO in North Carolina when the company slipped into bankruptcy, leaving a number of employees in the lurch.

About 14 states have some type of legislation on the books similar to West Virginia’s new law. “Are there places that have a track record of PEOs that we could somehow follow and not have to re-invent the wheel?” asked Sen. Ron Stollings, D-Boone, a doctor. Cline said the industry is interested in the Legislature providing some levels of regulation. “There are legitimate ones doing legitimate things out there,” the insurance commissioner said. “They’re concerned about the ones who might be doing it in a rogue manner.” Committee counsel Brenda Thompson said legislation “varies so greatly” in states that have enacted such legislation, “and it’s really a new creature.”

A lawsuit in Nevada over a PEO law has traveled through four courts already and remains unsettled after eight years of litigation, she pointed out. “This is pretty heavy stuff we’re going into,” Stollings said. “I wish someone had plowed a furrow for us to follow.”

PEOs function as a go-between for a business and its employees, such as in the operation of a firm offering temporary secretarial help, Jenkins explained afterward. “So that company writes one check to the PEO, who would cover all aspects of the employees,” the senator said. “It’s almost like having a dual employer situation. The PEO promotes itself as relieving that employer of the many traditional employer-employee management responsibilities.” A company may retain its right to discipline and fire its workers, but the PEO is the actual entity writing the checks, paying taxes on wages and covering the benefits, he said.

“As we studied this last year, we kept peeling back layers of what these PEOs did,” Jenkins said. “We realized it’s a very complex system.” Last year’s measure merely requires PEOs to register with Cline’s office to lay the groundwork for getting workers’ compensation coverage. “We were wanting to make sure employers weren’t dodging their workers’ compensation responsibilities by using a PEO, and a worker, if injured on the job, wouldn’t find himself in a Catch-22,” Jenkins said.

The Risk of Using Independent Contractors

The authors highlight some of the recent changes which may effect companies who employ independent contractors. State and federal regulators and legislators have taken steps to address the widely used, (and often abused) practice of misclassifying entire classes of employees as independent contractors. The report reveals why large and small employers alike should take care in assigning independent contractor status to individuals engaged in consulting, delivery and transportation, sales and marketing, management, personal and technical services.

Compliance and the fear of litigation is just one of the reasons that so many employers are seeking the services of third party employee management firms. Many service models exist, from payrolling companies - providers who serve contingent workforces, employee leasing companies, and PEO's - Professional Employer Organizations.

Below are excerpts from a recent article in the New York Law Journal.
http://www.nylj.com

By Richard J. Reibstein, John A. Nixon, Dan A. Schulder, Stuart A. Shorenstein and Tiffany Raspberry.

The legal landscape involving independent contractors has dramatically and swiftly changed. For decades, legal challenges to an employer's use of independent contractors were infrequent, and many companies were willing to risk the remote chance that they would have to defend a lawsuit or a regulatory inquiry that they had misclassified certain employees as independent contractors.

Over the last year, however, there has been a wave of regulatory and legislative initiatives at both the federal and state levels seeking to stem the use of independent contractors. In addition, companies have been faced with substantial judgments in highly visible lawsuits brought on behalf of classes of workers who have successfully established that they were common law employees improperly classified by their employers as independent contractors.

Regulatory Initiatives

Within the past year, there have been a number of initiatives regulating the use of independent contractors. In May 2007, the Internal Revenue Service undertook a worker misclassification program and announced that the misuse of independent contractors would be a major area of emphasis for the IRS in fiscal 2008. By Nov. 6, 2007, the IRS had entered into data-sharing agreements with 29 state workforce agencies to share the results of employment tax examinations. The IRS has also started to focus in earnest on large corporate employers that allegedly have misclassified employees as independent contractors. In December 2007, the IRS assessed FedEx Ground for $319 million in unpaid employment taxes and penalties, just for calendar year 2002, following the IRS's determination that FedEx Ground drivers had been misclassified as independent contractors.

The Risks of Misclassification

Some of the most substantial risks faced by employers that are found to have improperly reported the income of employees as independent contractors are liability for unpaid federal, state and local income tax withholdings and liability over Social Security and Medicare contributions that are not paid on a Form 1099. Other large financial risks include unpaid unemployment insurance premiums, unpaid Workers' Compensation premiums and unpaid overtime compensation and work-related expenses. These types of liabilities (plus interest and penalties for non-payment) can be potentially devastating for employers that make considerable use of independent contractors.

Another substantial risk is a claim of benefit entitlement by or on behalf of common law employees misclassified as independent contractors. Claims have been successfully brought for pension and profit-sharing benefits, medical benefits and even stock options.

Reclassification

One way to avoid future liability is to reclassify questionable independent contractors as employees. After determining the identity of the 1099ers, counsel should undertake an individualized assessment as to whether each person or class of persons so identified is legally an independent contractor or actually a common law employee.

The legal test for independent contractor or employee status varies according to the law being enforced. The IRS abandoned its fabled 20-factor test several years ago; its current test is supposedly more simplified, focusing on three principal aspects of the worker's relationship with the business: (1) the degree of behavioral control that the business can exercise over the individual; (2) the degree of financial control that the business can exercise over the individual; and (3) the parties' views and perceptions of the relationship. In the employee benefits arena, the U.S. Supreme Court has stated that the test under ERISA focuses upon the hiring party's "right to control the manner and means by which the product is accomplished."⁴ Although the Supreme Court, the IRS and state agencies have articulated their criteria for determining employee status, the application of these criteria is oftentimes vexing, even to experienced legal practitioners.

Employee Leasing

The use of a responsible employee leasing organization is a practical and viable alternative that allows 1099ers to continue to provide services to the company, yet it substantially minimizes a company's exposure to liability under the tax, employee benefits and labor laws. This alternative can dramatically reduce a company's risk of liability and substantially diminish the likelihood of a lawsuit or an audit by a governmental agency.

Unlike payrolling companies, an employee leasing organization is a third-party employer. Some or all of the company's 1099ers (as well as its long-term temps, project employees, per diems and consultants) can be hired as employees of the leasing organization, which withholds taxes; makes Social Security, Medicare and unemployment payments; pays Workers' Compensation premiums; and may also provide basic medical and dental benefits and offer participation in a 401(k) plan maintained by the leasing organization.

Employers have allowed themselves to be imperiled by such risks because there is a very significant economic inducement to avoid an array of payments required to be made for employees but not for independent contractors. Along with lax enforcement in the past by the IRS and state agencies, these financial incentives have led many businesses to overuse the independent contractor classification.

Conclusion

Now that the IRS and the states have prioritized and targeted employer misuse of independent contractors, companies that use 1099ers to supplement their work force should examine whether they may have legal exposure for employee misclassification. If the potential tax, employee benefits or labor law liability is significant, companies would be wise to seek the most appropriate ways to eliminate or minimize their exposure and comply with laws governing the use of independent contractors. A coordinated, interdisciplinary approach may best serve the company's interests.

There is a significant economic inducement to avoid an array of payments required to be made for employees but not for independent contractors. Along with lax enforcement in the past by the IRS and state agencies, these financial incentives have led many businesses to overuse the independent contractor classification.

The authors are members of WolfBlock's independent contractor compliance working group. Richard J. Reibstein (rreibstein@wolfblock.com) (employment), John A. Nixon (jnixon@wolfblock.com) (employee benefits), Dan A. Schulder (dschulder@wolfblock.com) (tax), and Stuart A. Shorenstein (sshorenstein@wolfblock.com) (government relations) are partners of WolfBlock. Tiffany Raspberry (traspberry@wolfblock.com) is a government relations specialist with WolfBlock Public Strategies.