We periodically consolidate our prior blog posts and push them out as a single package to help individuals catch up on what they might have missed with respect to important health and welfare, qualified retirement plan, and executive compensation issues. The posts highlighted here largely focus on the CARES Act and the impact the COVID-19 […]
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The Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security Act (the “CARES Act”), signed into law on March 27, 2020, provides employers with a new mechanism to assist their employees with repayment of student loans. Section 2206 of the CARES Act amends Section 127 of the Internal Revenue Code (the “Code”) to allow employers to pay up […]
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As employers cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, they may consider leave-sharing programs as a method to permit employees to donate paid leave to their coworkers. Leave-sharing programs that are properly structured under Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) guidance permit exclusion of transferred leave from the gross income of a donor employee and inclusion of the transferred […]
RJ
On April 9. 2020, the Internal Revenue Service (the “IRS”) issued Notice 2020-23, which extends a number of key filing deadlines in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The guidance provides welcome relief to individuals and plan sponsors who must perform certain “time-sensitive actions” on or after April 1, 2020 and before July 15, 2020. […]
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RJ
As the saying goes, “drastic times call for drastic measures” and, from an economic standpoint, these are drastic times. To fight the battle to stay in business many employers are considering a wide range of alternatives, including employee furloughs, layoffs and terminations. While some employers may also consider sweeping salary reductions, other employers may consider […]
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The U.S. Supreme Court is mulling over whether retirement plan participants must demonstrate individual or imminent risk of financial loss before seeking a breach of fiduciary duty action under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”). On January 13, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the matter of Thole v. […]
RJ
In enacting the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020, (the “Act”), Congress, among other changes, enacted the following key changes affecting employer group health plans: Repeal of the Cadillac Tax: Most notably, and a huge relief to most employers, Congress repealed the Cadillac tax. The Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) added a requirement requiring employers to pay […]
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On December 20, 2019, President Trump signed the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020, a spending bill that includes the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019 (the “SECURE Act”). The SECURE Act initially passed the House in May, as discussed in our S&W Benefits Blog “The SECURE Act – A Primer on […]
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Each year, we publish health and welfare, cost-of-living, qualified retirement plan, and executive compensation plan checklists to help individuals and employers stay apprised of updates to the law of employee benefits. We just published the last of these annual checklists. In case you missed them, the links are below. Happy Holidays! 2019 End of Year […]
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In our 2019 End of Year Plan Sponsor “To Do” List (Part 3) Qualified Plans, we suggested that sponsors of all qualified retirement plans should be on the lookout for the Internal Revenue Service’s (“IRS”) 2019 Required Amendments List (“2019 RA List”). The IRS recently published Notice 2019-64, which contains the 2019 RA List, https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-19-64.pdf. […]
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