Category: Benefits and Compensation

This topic provides guidance on how to handle compensation issues in a way that attracts and retains the best talent and advances the strategic goals of your business. You get news and tips on what’s going on nationally and in the states, and updates on changes in regulations, possible governmental action, and emerging compensation trends.

Let’s Eliminate Base Pay Merit Increases

Rubino, who is founder and president of Rubino Consulting Services in Pound Ridge, New York, offered his suggestions at the 64th SHRM Annual Conference and Exhibition, held recently in Atlanta, Georgia. Rubino asked his audience of HR managers how many of them had merit increase base salary systems. Most hands went up. Then he asked, […]

Immediate Reform Implementation Is Revenue-reporting and Tax-related (apart from SBC)

With the Supreme Court’s June 28 ruling affirming health reform, its legal requirements on employer health plans are a green light. Plans therefore continue to face important requirements this calendar year. Fortunately, they’re the same ones employers have known about for some time. But if an employer has been holding off from comprehensive implementation, a […]

Politics, Negative Ads, and Trust

Oswald, CEO of BLR, offered his thoughts on negative ads in a recent edition of The Oswald Letter: Take a look at the 2012 presidential race between President Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. The race has already taken on a very negative tone. A recent study by Wesleyan University showed that 70% of […]

Significant Lumpsum Payment Beats Merit Increase

Special from Atlanta–SHRM Annual Conference and Exhibition Yesterday’s Advisor featured consultant John Rubino’s plea for employers to eliminate merit base pay increases and replace them with lumpsum pay-for-performance awards. Today, more of his tips, plus an introduction to a new, reasonably priced, total training resource. Rubino, who is founder and president of Rubino Consulting Services […]

House Leader Schedules Vote to Overturn Health Reform

Expressing strong concerns about health reform’s negative impact on health costs and people’s ability to choose health care options, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., set a July 11 date for the House of Representatives to vote on legislation that would repeal the health care reform law. He said health reform is precluding people from […]

Hope Dims for Transit Benefit Parity

Employers may not have to adjust their qualified transportation fringe benefit programs after all — at least not just yet. A legislative provision that would have affected QTFBs by boosting the mass transit exclusion to the same level as that for qualified parking — the so-called “mass transit parity” provision — did not make it […]

Unintended Consequences of Sales Comp Programs

For example: If salespeople don’t view your program as competitive, your best salespeople will seek greener pastures. If salespeople don’t view your program as fair, there will be morale issues. (For example, if plans aren’t carefully thought through, some territories may experience a high volume of easy sales, while other territories have little opportunity to […]

House Vote Could Soon Determine Fate of Transit Parity

Employers that offer qualified transportation benefits should be aware that they may soon need to adjust their plans. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are setting the stage for the possible passage of a two-year federal highway funding law that could include a transit parity provision — which would return the mass transit exclusion to parity with […]

Health-care Reform Ruling Means Employers Must Now Set Sights on Compliance

The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on June 28 to uphold nearly all provisions of President Obama’s health-reform law removes any excuse for employers to drag their feet implementing reform-driven changes to their health plans. Uncertainty on whether the law still would be binding on plans was hindering implementation, many sources say, but with the […]

Health Reform Law Upheld by U.S. Supreme Court

The health care reform law was upheld today in the U.S. Supreme Court, which concluded that the controversial individual mandate is a tax and therefore falls into Congressional authority in the Taxing Clause of the Constitution. Chief Justice Roberts’ ruling was based on logic that was not the key focus of in oral arguments last […]