So good morning everyone and thank you for joining today’s webinar. It’s our first back to the basics series part one. We’ll have part two and three in the during the summer months. Today is managing seasonal and summer employees, so it’s a good time to talk about this with seasonal summer employees. And my name is Robin Carlini. I’ll be your webinar moderator today and I’ll be introducing our host Ashley Pope, who many of you know. But I do want to say before we actually get started that both Ashley and I are from the great city of New Orleans and we are experiencing a tropical depression. So Internet might be slow, but we both have power and we missed a tornado and a flood this morning. But we’re here. Everyone in the Gulf South, you might be experiencing it too, so thank you for being here. A little disclaimer about our webinar today. Solaris does not provide legal counsel. We are ACA knowledge experts, but for your specific legalese questions, you will still need to seek your legal counsel. And a little bit of housekeeping. Today’s webinar is being recorded. All registrants will be receiving the recording tomorrow. You can ask questions during the webinar and we can answer as we go through and towards the end. And also upon exiting, a survey will pop up. If you don’t mind answering the survey, we always ask what topics you like to see, and we do use your answers. And a little bit about Solarix. One in four companies, ALEs in the US use Solarix for their ACA reporting. And another big one I like to point out is we have mitigated over six fifty million dollars of penalties. And as you can see, we started when the law started. We’ve been a company since twenty thirteen. So you truly do get experts with us. And without further ado, I will introduce our host today, Ashley Pope, Director of ACA Services. Hi, Ashley. Good. Hello. Good morning, afternoon, everyone. As Robin stated, just warning, we are in Louisiana. Two states of weather. Are you okay? And happy because they’re relocating. So today is proving both of those things, so just bear with us. So we’re gonna gonna go with measurement methods, but I think Robin’s about to ask y’all a question so she can’t fool you on the question. Yes, I’m sorry I put my polls in yesterday. I can see if this one pops up, but it gave me five hundred polls to choose from instead of just today’s. So, you can just put the answers in the chat if you don’t mind. Do you have a process in place to automatically track employees approaching ACA eligibility? Yes, A, you have a fully automated system, B, partially automated, C, you have a manual process for this, or D, you have no process in place. And I will pull up the chat to see what y’all are answering. I see, manual process, partially automated. The manual process could be very tricky. I see quite a few of that, Ashley. It looks like a split between manual process and partially automated, with one saying no process in place. Hope for all of you doing manual that you have been graced with all full time employees and do not have to worry quite so much about hours. Okay, so let’s break this down and talk about it. So we’ve got two different measurement options we can use under ACA. The first one is what we call the monthly measurement method. And basically what this means is you’re looking at an employee’s actual hours every single month. They worked one hundred and thirty hours in that month, they’re considered full time and you should be offering them coverage. That sounds really easy. There are definitely things that make it a little tricky. So again, you are reviewing them every single month. If they hit one hundred thirty, you have to offer them coverage. The first time they hit it, you do get the wonderful ACA grace of ninety days plus first of month to offer them. But guess what? They don’t hit that mark again until six months later and you didn’t offer them the first time. Now there is no waiting period and you better offer them a meeting. So it becomes a little bit more administrative than everyone thinks it is. What is this best suited for? Those employees with consistent schedules where you’re not really having to guess what their hours are gonna be. You already know whether someone is working in a full time position or not and that they will be benefits eligible. This is more of a straightforward employee setup for it to work best for an employer. And then we get our look back measurement method, and what this does is allows an employer to look historically over a set period of time to determine if an employee is working an average of thirty hours or more a month, And if they are, they are benefits eligible under ACA. And then you have an administrative period that you have the opportunity to offer them coverage. And then they enter what’s called a stability period, which is the fixed length of time that employee is entitled to that coverage until they end another measurement period. So, basic keys of this are there is a measurement period of anywhere between three and twelve months. There is an administrative period that can be anything between zero and ninety days. There is a stability period that will equal the length of the measurement period, but it cannot be less than six months. So if you’re one of those that choose to do a three month look back measurement, the stability period for those employees is going to be six months because the law states it can’t be less than that. Look back measurement is best suited for those employers with a large number of variable hour employees or employees with extremely fluctuating schedules. When you’re seeking a very predictable and auditable track to determine eligibility, this is the way to go. And if you’ve got those long term ACA compliance strategies, this is great because you can kind of see the future forward forecast based off people’s hours. You’ve got all the look back history to be able to determine how many people might be coming onto coverage. It just gets a little bit easier to manage than the looking every single month. And then with any measurement method, there are certain classifications and special rules you have to pay attention to. There is what people call the breaks in service. So, if I have an employee who terminates and walks out my door, but decides that this was still a great place to work and comes back in less than thirteen weeks, I don’t get to treat them like a brand new hire. I have to offer them coverage if they were benefits eligible when they left. I have to honor that. If that employee takes too long to decide this was a great place to work and comes back greater than thirteen weeks, then all the time clocks start over. So again, if an employee leaves and comes back within thirteen weeks, you do have to offer them coverage coming in the door if they were benefits eligible when they left. If it exceeds thirteen weeks, then you do not have to offer to them because you get to measure them again. Or if they’re a full time employee coming in the door, they’re going to fall under your normal waiting period. Now, our schools, which we already know are special because they take care of our precious young people, but they get some special calls. Because schools don’t necessarily operate on a twelve month calendar year, they get to be allowed what’s called special breaks in service for educational organizations. They can have up to twenty six consecutive weeks with no hours of service, and that does not ding them from a measurement perspective. So basically what that means is if I’m doing a look back measurement of twelve months, but for six weeks I have employees that don’t work because school is closed, I’m not going to count those hours of service, those six weeks within my measurement period, because at the end of the day, that is not fair to the employer because the business is not open and that is the way that it works. So, now we’re going to talk about what is a full time, what is a part time, what is a seasonal employee. I know we all have our definitions, but believe it or not, the ACA has very specific definitions for them. That’s not what you would think too, yes. Okay, our next poll, again, please type in the chat. How confident are you that your organization is correctly classifying seasonal and variable hour employees? Are you A, very confident, B, someone confident, C, not very confident at all, or D, you’re just not sure? Oh, I like all those Bs. We have one person who’s not sure. Yes. It looks like most everyone answered B, somewhat confident, which is better than I thought based on the last poll being manual process. And 1D is unsure. So, we can clarify some of that today. Okay, so what constitutes a full time employee? Again, this is ACA specific because we do recognize that companies may have different definitions for what constitutes a full time employee. But if you’re an Applicable Large Employer, the ACA says a full time employee is one that the employer has a reasonable expectation that they’re gonna work a minimum of thirty hours per week or one hundred and thirty hours in a month. So again, that’s average of thirty hours per week or one hundred and thirty hours in a month. Those full time hires are subject to whatever your established waiting period is for benefits, but it cannot exceed ninety days with coverage being effective the first of the calendar month following completion of that waiting period. Those are the ACA rules. And a full time equivalent, which you will hear a lot, under ACA means that those, an ACA full time equivalent is how you determine that ALE specs. So how do we actually figure out if we’re an applicable large employer? Hopefully everyone knows that. But if you’re brand new and you have it as a business and you don’t know, or if you’re kind of broadening that line and you’ve never become an ALE but you’re close to it, here’s how you get to that. So as you can see in our calculation example, you’re gonna go out and you’re gonna count all those true full time employees that you know are working an average of thirty hours a month a week when you hire them. You’re then gonna take all of your part time employees in a month. You’re gonna look at their hours. You’re gonna add all their hours together except anyone who worked more than a hundred and twenty hours, you’re gonna cap them at one twenty. You’re then going to take that number of hours and you’re going to divide by one twenty. And that’s gonna give you the part time employees that get counted as full time equivalents. You then add that to your true full time employee number and you come out on the other end with your average FTE count, which in our example here is forty five, which would not make them an applicable large employer. But if that number had been thirty full time employees and we ended up with sixty full time equivalents, then we’ve exceeded that fifty threshold. We are then an ALE and now we have to do ACA reporting and comply with those laws. So, for those full time employees, evaluate your group health plan for grandfathered status. You want to review those plan documents to determine if the benefits require changes because you want it to be ACA compliant. Provide the required notices to those employees and their dependents, and then you want to make sure that you comply with ACA so that you’re not paying penalties to the IRS for not meeting your obligations. So full time employee example. Again, person who is reasonably expected to work an average of thirty hours per week comes in the door, you need to consider them full time. That means they need to be offered benefits, not to exceed ninety days from date of hire. Examples of this would be lawyers, doctors, accountants, teachers, you know, all those people that work a full eight to five day Monday through Friday. Those are your full time employees. But what constitutes a part time or variable hour employee? So within ACA these two things are really the same thing. Part time, variable hour. We know they’re not we don’t have a reasonable expectation that they’re going to work an average of thirty hours a week or more coming in the door, so we consider them part time or variable. These employees are working either uncertain or fluctuating hours. This is where challenges can be posed. You have to be tracking those employees for eligibility purposes because you don’t want to get dinged if they go over the average thirty hour mark or the one hundred and thirty hour if you’re doing monthly. Why variable hour? This is used when employees hours are unpredictable. You have to determine eligibility based off counting those hours under the calculations allowed by the ACA. And that means that you have to be offering them benefits. Just like you would full time people, you’re just measuring them first. So key factors in that variable hour determination. We need to know are employees working, whether employees who are in the same or similar positions are or are not full time workers. Typically, part time full time is the determinant on job position, right? Not by whether I want John to be full time and Jane to be part time or vice versa. It needs to be off a reasonable classification. Whether the new employee was replacing another employee who was not a full time worker, and whether the job description or the contract documents specify responsibilities or indicate that they’re expected to work at least thirty hours of service each week. If the answer to that is yes, they’re not variable hour. They are full time. If the answer to that is we’re not sure, you may work ten hours this week and twenty hours next week and maybe thirty the next week, that is fluctuating and variable and you get to track that employee to determine their eligibility status. Now, if you have variable or part time employees, again, as we’ve said repeatedly in a little ad nauseam, make sure you’re calculating those average weekly hours or their monthly hours of service. You wanna make sure from a look back measurement perspective that you are locking that employee status in during that stability period because you don’t get to decide halfway through it that you don’t wanna offer them coverage anymore. They remain as a calculated ACA full time employee until the end of that stability period. And you want to treat the employee according to whatever their ACA calculated status was during the entire length of that stability period. So again, if they calculated out non full time, they’re not gonna offer them benefits until they calculate out again and you see what those average hours were then. So part time and variable hour employee examples, those are gonna be our retail folks who work changing schedules, hospitality workers who may work one convention and not work the next, substitute teachers who just come in for shorter periods of time to cover for someone being out and may not work the whole day or a whole month or even a whole week. Common examples of these, like cashiers, delivery drivers, retail associates, staffing company employees. All of those are typical variable hour employee examples. Okay. And now we’re off to our next poll. What is your biggest challenge when hiring seasonal or summer employees? Is it the tracking hours, determining eligibility, how to classify them in general, or staying compliant with the changing schedules of those employees. You want to type in your answers? I see we have several determining eligibility, some tracking hours. So, it’s all in line with what we expect. Oh, we’re getting one of everything, it looks like. Now we have employee classification. So, I think everyone pretty much needs help with all of It’s all complicated. We know. Thank you for your responses. Alright, so under ACA, what constitutes a seasonal employee? Let’s start this out by saying that just because you think they’re seasonal does not mean ACA considers them seasonal. A seasonal employee is one who is hired into a position that’s going to last six months or less and typically recurs at the same time every year. So example of that, ski instructor. Snow season only lasts so long, at least here in the States. Lifeguards, because summer swim season only lasts so long everywhere but Louisiana, because here you might be swimming in December. So it’s important that the law treats these seasonal employees just like variable hour employees, and their eligibility for benefits is determined based on their average hours worked during a measurement period. So again, they’re gonna go through the same exact process as everyone else. And if at the end of that they’ve worked enough hours, they should be offered coverage. Here’s the catch. If you’re doing a look back of twelve months and you have seasonal employees, those seasonal employees should not be making it to the end of that measurement period because they should not be working more than six months at a time. Big note here, paid interns may be considered employees and should also be included in ACA eligibility tracking. Just because you put a tag of intern on an employee and you only really expect them to work four or five months or a semester, you still need to be tracking them in the event they stay around and you have to offer them coverage. So if you have those seasonal employees, first, before you ever put that tag on them, look at the job position. Is it really seasonal? Are you just wanting to call it seasonal? Because it doesn’t work that way. You’re gonna wanna check and update seasonal employee information every month. Again, review it. If that employee’s been there longer than six months, they’re not seasonal anymore and you need to reclassify them and make sure you’re tracking them accordingly. And again, track those seasonal employee hours because if you know, you never know that ski instructor might move into managing the resort, which now has a great pool and whatever and now they’re no longer seasonal. Their management hopefully track their hours because you should be offering them coverage. So common questions we hear about seasonal employees. What if you hire a seasonal employee as full time? Well, you can certainly do that. But if you hire them as full time, you should be offering them coverage coming in the door. You should have a reasonable expectation that they’re gonna work an average of thirty hours or more. What if you hire a seasonal employee who’s part time? Seasonal employees basically are variable hour part time employees. You’re still gonna track their hours, just the expectation is that they’re probably not going to be there long enough because the season is not going to be that long unless you’re doing a very short measurement period to hang around for insurance. And then can you extend a seasonal employee’s hours past six months? The short answer is yes in rare exceptions. You can’t just keep them around longer because you want to. There has to be a trackable reason of why you did that. And when I say trackable, that means you better have a defensible argument to the IRS of why that seasonal employee worked more than six months. Perfect example of that would be a ski instructor who works seven months instead of six because for whatever reason there was an unusually long snow season. That doesn’t typically happen. So in that case, that seasonal employee can stay in a Seasonal Employment Classification because it doesn’t usually happen. I believe you went over a lot of examples. These are just a few more. We can go through them. Again, lifeguards, great example of seasonal employees. Ski instructors hired just for winter season. Those holiday holiday retail workers are the Santas and the elves and all those people. They are seasonal workers. Tax preparers that only work during tax season. Summer camp counselors. Golf course staff that’s hired during peak of golf season because in most places other than the deep south, like here, golf season does not last all year long. Common example of those seasonal employees again was the ski resort instructor who’s hired from November through March each year. He doesn’t work November through June every year. That would not be a feasible employee. Can you exclude hours worked for any employee? There are some cases where you do get to exclude hours. So volunteer employees. These are hours worked by bonafide volunteers for tax exempt or governmental organizations can be excluded from your ACA calculations. Student employees under a federal or state work study program do not need to be counted for ACA purposes. However, any hours paid outside that work study program, you have to include. Religious orders may be excluded if performed by a member of a religious order who’s taken a vow of poverty and is performing duties required by the order. Teacher and adjunct faculty. This goes back kind of to our special breaks and services for schools. Their compensation isn’t always tied to the hours they work, so you have to use a reasonable method to credit those hours of service for teachers and adjunct faculty. For example, summer break, which most schools are on right now, you don’t get to ding a teacher and tell her she’s not benefits eligible because she gets three months off. Good benefit to have, but doesn’t preclude her from medical insurance. Which is a good thing. Yes. Risk, what happens if you classify someone incorrect? There are definitely risks that go with that, and from your poll answers, a few of you have those concerns. So, there are risks across the board. If I classify somebody as seasonal and I don’t pay attention to them and they end up working eight months, that’s a risk, right? If I classify somebody as full time and offer them coverage, but they really didn’t work an average of thirty hours a week, because I didn’t pay enough attention to the job position they were in, Now those were offered. That cost the company money that I didn’t have to put out there. If I’ve got a variable hour employee who I’m classified as variable hour, they can still become a risk. If I’m not paying attention to their hours and offering them coverage like I should be, that becomes a problem. And then we have the wonderful world of staffing agencies, which is a constant revolving door. So they have even higher risk because of employee turnip. So staffing agencies typically are responsible for offering coverage. If you’ve got employees that are around to be measured, you do have to offer them coverage if they reach those ACA status bars. Breaks and service rules still apply. So if I go on a job assignment for a staffing company from January to March, and I decide to take April off, guess what? When I pick up another job in May, I hope the employer was still tracking me because all of my hours determined into my ACA eligibility status because I didn’t go away and have no hours of service long enough to be considered gone. So assuming temporary workers are exempt from ACA requirements is a risk and a bad idea. You need to make sure you know who is responsible for offering coverage. Again, as a staffing agency, that employee belongs to you until they disembark from your program and go work directly for another employer. So you are responsible for offering coverage where applicable. And again, tracking those hours of service accurately. You gotta make sure that you’re keeping up with all the assignments and all the turnover and all the turnaround. So staffing agencies do not eliminate just being a staffing agency does not eliminate your ACA obligation. If as a staffing agency, you’re an applicable large employer, you are responsible for following the ACA rules as well. Other dangers of incorrect classification. Miss offering affordable coverage to someone, that could cost you money in the long run. That can happen with misclassification because like I said, if I classified somebody as seasonal and didn’t pay attention to them and they worked more than six months and met the hours, then guess what? I could get penalized for not offering that person coverage. That opens you up to those potential IRS penalties and assessments, and they are no joke. The IRS is getting more and more strict and less and less forgiving with mitigating penalties. Inaccurate eligibility tracking is gonna lead to those dangers of not offering coverage. If you have reporting errors on your ten ninety four C or ten ninety five C, your numbers could be wrong if you didn’t classify your employees right. Anybody that’s had to file ACA, you know part three of ten ninety four has your total full time employee count, and if you did not classify enough people correctly, that could cause you problems because you didn’t accurately reflect your numbers on that form. Again, increased compliance and risk, and truthfully, just administrative burden and corrective actions. If you do it right the first time, that saves yourself time and headache and stress and no penalties, as opposed to if you have to go backwards and redo everything that’s doing the same work twice, not very efficient. So key takeaways here. We want to properly classify people at hire. It’s critical. It could cost us money. We don’t want to pay money to the government any more than we have to. Full time employees generally average thirty or more hours per week or, again, one hundred and thirty hours in a month and should be eligible for coverage. Accurate hours tracking is absolutely essential for determining eligibility and maintaining compliance, especially with those variable hour endpoints. Whenever you are in doubt, track the hours, because that will always be defensible in the end when you can show that. Consistent classification, accurate measurement, ongoing monitoring are the foundations of ACA compliance. This is also the one of the reasons you will hear Solirix reach to the heavens that ACA is not a once a year type of thing. This should be something you’re monitoring throughout the year. Yes. We like to say thirty minutes a month. Right, Ashley? Coffee break. Yes. Yes. ACA coffee break. Okay, and a little bit about Solaris as we wrap up. We do have our standalone ACA, which Ashley is in charge of here. So we do everything. We work with any payroll, BEN admin system. If you do it yourself, we take everybody. We also have integrated ACA that will be integrated when you sign up for our BEN admin system. You won’t have to touch uploading anything or anything. It’ll be all integrated. So, we just want to point out we do have two ACA platforms as well. Our very last poll question, what would be most helpful to your organization after today’s webinar? Would you like ACA compliance resources and guides, A review of a current ACA process? C, better eligibility tracking tools? D, support with ACA reporting and filing? Or E, you’re fine, no additional support needed? Or F, you just wish some genie would show up and do all of this for you. Yes. I do like Byron’s answer, A, B, C, D, E. You get an A for that one. And Kim, we will follow back with you with your question. Kim, if you could let us know if you’re part of BENSelect’s integrated ACA or our standalone, that will help us track that down just a little bit faster. I think I know the answer. That would be helpful. All right, Brian. Byron. Byron, very good news. He’s going to be a customer starting on nineone, which is perfect timing for ACA season. Welcome to the Solarix family. We love to hear that. Okay, thank you for your answers. We will follow-up accordingly however you answered. And now we will take your questions. But you can scan the code for next month’s webinar, which is on ACA Reporting and Affordability Made Clear. And we also have a couple resources you can download. We have a corresponding blog to this webinar and mid year compliance check list. Free to scan anything or take anything you want, but we will stay on and answer any questions. Can submit them in the chat or the Q and A box. Ashley, do you have anything as we wrap up? Not really. I mean, kind of what we’ve said throughout it, compliance, compliance, compliance. Don’t wait until the end of the year because, you know, wait until the end of the year to find out you misclassified people and Joe was actually full time and not part time or seasonal. It can cost you money and you can’t fix it in December. You’ve been paying attention in January and you can get ahead of it and even if you you know didn’t catch it in January when you should have offered him but noticed in March that’s a whole lot cheaper than what you know in February. And since filing season ended a little while ago, and if you had any mistakes you had to correct, make sure those corrections are going forward as well. Details did you okay. Kim, we’ll we’ll follow back. It’s a specific question on her account, but we will follow-up with you, Kim. And thank you everybody for joining. I hope this helped everyone out. I know everybody did comment with their poll questions that this is confusing. So, we hope this cleared it up. You can also contact me. Everybody should have my email if you have any follow-up questions. We’ll get back with you, but we hope to see you next month and appreciate your time today and stay dry. If you’re in the Gulf South. Yes. Thank you, Ashley, for your Thank you. Bye bye, everyone. Bye bye.
