Compliance Corner: Notice Requirements That You Need to Know About
Last month, we introduced our Compliance Corner to help employers better understand their requirements from the government. In this issue, we’ll review the various notice requirements that apply to employee benefit programs. If you’d like to revisit the prior article, please click here.
Notice Requirements:
- Annual Notices required by the Federal government
- COBRA or State Continuation (if applicable)
- Summary Plan Description or a Wrap Summary Plan Description with Certificates of Coverage from carriers
- Section 125 or Premium Only Plan Document that discusses methods the employer intends to follow for collecting employee premiums and what they’ll do with those funds and to whom they’ll be paid
- Wellness programs where medical history or labwork is collected or if there are differentials in premiums based on participation. Most of the participation-only programs offered by insurers do not require this notice.
- State-specific requirements e.g. Illinois implemented a new notice requirement for any member residing in their state regardless of where the coverage is purchased.
- Situation-specific notices that must be provided if they apply.
ARC Benefit Solutions helps clients with compliance by preparing Annual Notices for clients to review and send out to employees, negotiating vendor deals for COBRA or state continuation services, as well as providing boilerplate notices for Wrap Summary Plan Descriptions and/or Section 125 documents. In some cases, the plan documents may be provided by the health plan.