It’s the most wonderful time of the year! It’s time to start making our “compliance” lists and check them twice.  Ok, enough with the holiday analogies, in all seriousness, it’s time for business to start thinking about the New Year and all of the employment reporting requirements mandated annually by the federal government.

Employee Benefits, Affirmative Action and OSHA 300, oh my!  These are just a few examples of areas employers must comply with regulations.  We here at HR Advisors Group thought it would be helpful to provide a quick overview of some of the areas that should be on every HR executive’s radar as you move into 2013.

There are many regulations that employers must comply with annually related to Employee Benefits.  Some basic disclosure requirements for Pension and Welfare Benefit plans include:

  • Summary Plan Descriptions (SPD) – This is the primary vehicle for informing participants and beneficiaries about their plan and how it operates.  It must be written for an average participant and be sufficiently comprehensive to apprise the covered employee of their benefits, rights and obligations under the plan. Also, if you make changes to your plans, you should update the SPD within 120 days of that plan change.
  • Summary of Material Modifications (SMM) – If you don’t want to go to all the trouble of completely restating the SPD, a business can issue an SMM instead.  The SMM describes material modifications to a plan and changes in the information required to be in the SPD.  This must be issued to participants and beneficiaries no later than 210 days following the changes.
  • Summary Annual Report (SAR) – This is a narrative for participants of the form 5500 that is filed each year for the benefit plans.  It must be sent to employees and participants no later than nine months after the plan year ends or two months after the due date for filing the Form 5500.
  • Form 5500 Filing – This form must be filed by the plan administrator by the last day of the 7th calendar month after the end of the plan year.  You can file an extension that gives you another two and a half months to file the form.  Typically, with 401k plans, you must accompany the filing with an independent audit review of the plan.  Audits can be time consuming, so it’s best to start planning early for getting the auditors in and the audit done as quickly as possible.

As you can see, there’s a lot of things to keep track of relating simply to employee benefits. We’ll follow up with a second post that focuses on Affirmative Action and OSHA 300, so stay tuned for goodness sake!