American Union does much more than handle all of your Employee Benefits Insurance questions and daily service needs with administration, claims or accounting issues. We also include annually shopping for the best values for the client’s plans in the marketplace.
Equally, if not more important, we help you understand your Compliance Responsibilities by consulting and interfacing with the leading government and private sector experts for all Employer Compliance regulations. This helps us to help you to make certain that your plan(s) documentation is up-to-date and correct with all current Federal regulations, and State regulations if required.
Do you know that a Summary Plan Description (SPD) checklist has at least 14 key information points? If one is not accurately worded, then the entire SPD can be considered ‘non-compliant’ and may subject the Employer to fines and invite possible civil action. At this time, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) keeps a close watch and audits employers on compliance.
Are your plans up-to-date for COBRA (as revised by the ARRA-2009), ERISA, HIPAA (as revised by GINA, MHPAEA and Michelle’s Law, all from 2008), and CHIPRA-2009? Many of these are clearly defined under Part A of title XXVII of the Public Health Services (PHS) Act? Or how about the Newborns’ and Mothers’ Health Protection Act, back in 1996.
With all of the changes in payrolls these past two years, do all of these regulations of compliance still apply to your organization or company? How do you know?
Did you know that you may have some employees who are nearing retirement this year and will come under the CMS guidelines?
Do you know that the open enrollment for 2010 is from Nov. 15 through December 31, 2009 only? Should you be passing along this information to some one in your group? Better to do it in writing, rather than just verbally.
Because the DOL often issues amendments to the regulations requiring additional information to be included in SPDs, any failure to include these changes may cause the employer to be in non-compliance and risk civil penalties. We are here to help prevent that from happening to you.
A part of American Union’s service commitment to our clients is to help those clients to find appropriate technical resources and employee benefit insurance they need to fulfill all regulatory compliance requirements in a timely and accurate way. For our fully insured clients, American Union will provide a template, updated annually or more often as required by changes in the law, for preparing a SPD document which can be used to distribute to employees and supplement the handbooks provided by the insurance companies.
During any and all conversations and correspondence with our clients:
- We protect your confidentiality.
- We advise and help protect you from inaccurate or incomplete regulatory compliance, notifications and documentations. Every year.
- We can also help you with your Employee Handbook that concerns itself with Employee Benefits, COBRA, ERISA, HIPAA, OJSA, and USERRA.
For Employee Handbooks, we can point you in the right direction and provide you a choice of experts who will help you on the other eleven major topics and their forty-three sub-headings. That’s a total of 61 key points that your handbook should have.
If you have more than fifty employees in a calendar quarter and more than for two calendar quarters in one calendar year, then this may apply to you. This part is included in our services when American Union is acting as your Employee Benefits broker.
Many of the above actions are included in our service to you. We earn our way through the commissions paid to American Union by the insurance provider you have selected for that part of your Employee Benefits plan(s).
The costs for a detailed review of your SPD and most regulatory compliance documentation services are paid directly by American Union to the expert doing the service, or a nominal charge is passed on to the policyholder, or employer or organization by American Union. All fees and commissions are fully disclosed as they occur, monthly, quarterly or annually, or in advance as deemed by the client.
For clients with more than 100 employees or members, American Union can work with you to design either partial or fully self-funded premium alternatives and eliminate those high premiums rate increases you would normally expect from an insurance company. For many groups, this can reduce your total annual premium costs for certain benefits by as much as 15% in a calendar year. These premium savings come with additional rewards, risks and limitations. American Union will provide all comparative facts for your careful consideration and invite your outside legal and accounting advisors to participate as well.
