Health and welfare compliance requirements have increased considerably over the last several years and continue to grow in number due to new provisions from health care reform.
Even employers who have been diligent about complying with new issues as they have arisen are finding it overwhelming to track the accumulation of these requirements, says Jeff Morgan, executive vice president of USI’s San Francisco office.
“Even employers devoting significant resources to staying on top of this are having difficulty getting their arms around it,” he says.
Smart Business spoke with Morgan about how employers can keep plans compliant.
Why this onslaught of new compliance tasks?
It would be easy to blame health care reform for the additional reporting requirements, but this is nothing new. Over the last several years, new notice requirements for Medicare D, CHIPRA, and the Newborns and Mothers Health Protection Act, to name a few, have been accumulating. When you add the San Francisco Health Care Ordinance (SFHCO), HIPAA and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (health care reform) to this equation, the result is a daunting project for even experienced human resources staffs.
How can employers begin to bring their plans into compliance?
We often find that employers have added new requirements to their routine on an ad hoc basis and that when a broader review is performed, some items have been overlooked, or the employer was not aware of a specific requirement. They should perform a full review based on a long list of criteria. This will catch the new requirements from health care reform, as well as older requirements from COBRA, HIPAA and ERISA.
In which particular areas are employers overlooking requirements of the law?
There are three areas to which employers should be paying particular attention: HIPAA privacy and security rules, discrimination rules under health care reform and the funding requirements of the San Francisco Health Care Ordinance.
For employers that self-fund their benefits or otherwise handle protected health information regarding plan participants, the requirements under HIPAA to build an infrastructure to protect that information can be formidable. Without guidance, many employers may neglect what is prescribed by regulation.
Health care reform places new requirements on insured plans to not discriminate in favor of highly compensated employees. This includes not only differences in benefits but also in employer contributions toward benefits. Executive perquisites in benefits need to become a thing of the past in order to comply. Self-funded plans always had nondiscrimination rules, and these are unchanged.
SFHCO requires employers to fund at specified levels for the benefit of any qualified employees. Many employers do not clearly understand these requirements or fund correctly for them.
