Benefits – What Should Your Broker Be Doing for You?

When your company sets up a retirement plan, healthcare plan, or other benefits package for its employees, chances are you also hire a broker to handle the money contributed and invest it properly, so that the fund grows over time. But there’s a lot more to managing benefits than that. There are a variety of enrollment, contribution, and tax issues to be overseen as well. Does your broker handle those? Here are a few of the services your broker should be providing.

1. ACA Compliance and Real Time Affordability Testing. The healthcare plan you offer needs to be compliant with Affordable Care Act standards, including standards of affordability for contributions (9.69% of an employee’s annual income in 2017 under pay or play and premium tax eligibility rules). Your broker should help you ensure compliance, including real time affordability testing, to make sure contributions meet the current standard.

2. Eligibility Management. Who in your company is eligible for what benefits? This can be a complex equation, dependent on a number of factors, such as their contract, their position in the company, how long they’ve worked there, and legal and compliance issues. Your broker should be managing benefits eligibility issues across your entire employee population, so you always know who’s eligible for what.

3. Open Enrollment. Now that you’ve determined which employees are eligible for what benefits, how do you help them take advantage of them? Your broker should provide you with an open enrollment portal that employees can use simply, linked to your payroll, so that proper deductions are made automatically. This should also include an on-site team to manage your open enrollment, overseeing the process and making sure patients get what’s coming to them.

4. IRS Form 5500 Preparation. Form 5500 covers pensions and employee benefit plans. It’s the responsibility of the plan’s sponsor (i.e. your company) to file form 5500 within 7 months of the end of each plan year. Your broker should take care of this for you.

5. COBRA Administration. Under certain circumstances, federal law allows employees and their families to remain under an employer-sponsored health plan, even if they’re otherwise no longer eligible. For example, if the employee dies or gets divorced, their spouse can still remain on their insurance. Or if their child was previously covered, but is no longer considered a dependent, they can stay insured. These regulations are part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. Keeping track of the circumstances of eligibility and seeing which of your employees fall under COBRA is a complex task, which should be overseen by your broker.

Here are some of the other services that your broker should offer.

• Full assistance with ACA and IRS reporting.
• A bilateral feed from payroll to insurance carriers
• Auto-populating employee participation cost deductions into your payroll
• An accurate census for annual market review
• Access to a private exchange option
• An integrated platform to administer Health Savings Accounts, Health Reimbursement Accounts, and Flexible Spending Accounts.
• Transitional Reinsurance Preparation
• PCORI Preparation

Many of these issues are legally necessary for your company to deal with if you’re providing benefits to your employees. Those that aren’t legal issues are ones of convenience, to make everything easier both for you and for the employees. Either way, the complex ins and outs involved in providing benefits plans can take a lot of time and effort to implement properly. Your company shouldn’t have to spend the time and resources on it. Your broker should be providing you these services, allowing you to concentrate more fully on what your company does best, and providing both you and your employees with peace of mind, knowing that everything is fully taken care of.

Paypro takes Benefits Management to the next level. Our expert team of Licensed Benefits Consultants will help you choose the right package for your company and is with you through it all. Please contact us with questions – we are here to help simplify your workforce management!