First we have over 700,000 ACA cus­tomers claim­ing tax cred­its for buy­ing cov­er­age but, accord­ing to the Finance Com­mit­tee Chair­man, “didn’t both­er to file their tax­es” and thus poten­tial­ly burned the US gov­ern­ment for $2 bil­lion in bogus pay­ments. Then again, there were over 300,000 that over­paid an aver­age of $110 on their 2014 tax return. Giveth, taketh…but what was the num­ber sup­posed to be and who is doing the counting?

Fam­i­ly Rights…what is right and what did they write and what is left?

 A quick sum­ma­ry of what you need to know if you have 50 or more employees:

  1.  Must dis­play a new poster regard­ing The Fam­i­ly Care and Med­ical Leave (CFRA)
  2.  Must also dis­play a new poster regard­ing the Preg­nan­cy Dis­abil­i­ty Leave
  3.  Time spent on preg­nan­cy dis­abil­i­ty leave does NOT count toward the 12 weeks of insur­ance cov­er­age an employ­ee is sep­a­rate­ly enti­tled to under the CFRA for tak­ing leave to bond with a new baby – thus an employ­er may be required to pro­vide as much as 29 1/3 weeks of con­tin­ued group health coverage
  4.  Employ­ers now have only five busi­ness days to respond to CFRA leave requests (was 10)
  5.  Employ­ers may require employ­ees to use accrued vaca­tion or PTO dur­ing oth­er­wise unpaid por­tions of CFRA leaves
  6.  An employ­er must lim­it leave incre­ments to the short­est peri­od of time that the employer’s pay­roll sys­tem uses to account for absences or use of leave pro­vid­ed it is not greater than one hour
  7.  When the nature of the employee’s job makes it phys­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble to take inter­mit­tent leave dur­ing the mid­dle of the employee’s shift, the employ­ee shall be per­mit­ted to return to work if he or she is able to per­form oth­er aspects of the work that are not phys­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble, such as admin­is­tra­tive duties
  8.  Employ­ee expan­sion – under FMLA and CFRA an eli­gi­ble employ­ee had to work for an employ­er with at least 50 part or full time employ­ees with­in 75 miles of the work­site. Under new reg­u­la­tions, Cal­i­for­nia based employ­ees with­out a fixed work­site loca­tion to com­mute to work may now be pro­tect­ed by the CFRA. Thus telecom­muters and sales­peo­ple who are attached to the Home Office but are remote should now be cov­ered by the CFRA

 

Rein­state­ment Rights: employ­ers are now express­ly required to rein­state an employ­ee return­ing from CFRA leave regard­less of whether or not his/her posi­tion was replaced or restruc­tured to accom­mo­date the employee’s absence.