How is withholding affected by the TCJA? The amount you elected to have withheld on your Form W-4 under the previous tax law might need to be revised under the new law. If you withhold too much, you're effectively giving the IRS an interest-free loan to use your money until it's refunded after you file [...]
If your company sends its employees off for education, training, counseling or psychological testing on their own time, you may have to pay them. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) generally requires employers to pay non-exempt employees for all the hours they work. (On the other hand, exempt employees are generally salaried staff members compensated [...]
Often companies decide to conduct formal employee surveys when leaders "begin to feel that things have turned slowly south," or when a crisis hits, says Tom Agnew, co-author of a book titled "The Enemy of Engagement, Put an End to Workplace Frustration — and Get the Most from Your Employees." Why wait? The purpose of polling [...]
When an employee leaves your company, the complicated issue of the final paycheck arises. And how your company handles the check depends on state and federal laws, which can make it difficult for businesses operating in more than one state to come up with a uniform nationwide policy. State laws generally determine the timing of [...]
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) reports the number of age discrimination claims remains high. The EEOC logged 18,376 such cases during its 2017 fiscal year. What's more, the EEOC says that monetary benefits paid out for this type of claim reached a staggering total of $90.1 million in 2016. Those numbers should make employers [...]
The electronic service, launched in 1996, is primarily a voluntary web-based system, though it could soon become mandatory. E-Verify enables employers to quickly determine whether information supplied by job applicants on their I-9 forms is consistent with data held by the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. In effect, this is a [...]
Normally, your company isn't required to withhold taxes on non-taxable fringe benefits. After all, the employees generally won't have to pay income tax or FICA on those benefits anyway. But taxable non-cash fringe benefits are a different story: They generally must be reported to the IRS and are subject to withholding of income and payroll taxes. [...]
Most 401(k) plans permit hardship withdrawals, though plan sponsors aren't required to allow them. As it stands today, employees seeking to take money out of their 401(k) accounts are limited to the funds they contributed to the accounts themselves, and only after they've first taken a loan from the same account. Loans must be repaid, [...]
Employee morale is a measurable, controllable expense. That's the position of Carol Hacker, author of "The High Cost of Low Morale." And according to Hacker, employers and workplace leaders "can beat the negativity that saps employees' energy." Employee morale involves the attitudes of individuals and groups toward their work, their environment, their managers, and the [...]
The most obvious way for employers to measure the full impact of employee turnover is to look at the corresponding loss of productivity when positions go unfilled. You'll also need to look at the cost to find replacements. But that's just the start. The rest of it is part of what can be called the [...]
