Monthly Archives: March 2013

New I-9 Form Required

Documentation, Hiring

On March 8, 2013, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services released a new I-9 form that all employers must begin using by May 7, 2013, to document the employment eligibility of new hires. If you are reverifying the eligibility of a current employee because an eligibility document expired, or if you are rehiring a former employee, you must also use the new form for those purposes. Just as before, every new employee must provide you with documents that verify the employee’s identity and eligibility to work in the United States within the first 3 days of employment. Only the form on which that eligibility review is documented has changed.

Here is the link to the new form: https://www.uscis.gov/files/form/i-9.pdf. There is no reason to delay in beginning to use this form, so make sure whoever is in charge of your hiring is aware of the change to the form.

 

Employers Required to Post New FMLA Information

Employee Rights, Forms and Policies, , ,

If you employ 50 or more employees (counted by names on a payroll, whether full-time, part-time, owner, etc.), your business is subject to the requirements of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which generally gives employees up to 12 weeks (26 weeks for military family leave) of unpaid leave for pregnancy, the birth or adoption of a child, a serious health condition of the employee or a family member or for leave associated with the call to active duty or the injury of a member of the military. If your business is subject to the FMLA, you must place a poster on your workplace bulletin boards about your employees’ rights under FMLA. A few weeks ago, the Department of Labor changed a little of the language of that poster with regards to military families and airline flight crews. Even if these changes don’t specifically apply to your workplace, if you employ 50 or more employees, you must post the new FMLA poster in your workplace by March 8, 2013. You can find the new poster and print out a free copy of it at: https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/posters/fmlaen.pdf.

TWC Creates Calculator to Estimate the Effect of Unemployment Claim

Benefits, Termination,

Whenever a Texas employer receives a Notice of Application for Unemployment Benefits, the first question that runs through the employer’s head is “How much is this going to cost me?” The answer to that question can influence whether the employer decides to protest the unemployment decision, how much time, effort and worry to invest in the protest and whether to hire a lawyer to protest the unemployment award. The cost estimate has been a difficult question for employment lawyers to answer. But now the TWC has provided all of us a calculator that will estimate how a particular employer’s tax rate will change if the former employee collects the maximum unemployment benefits.

When you receive the initial notice, go to this site and input your former employee’s salary for four of the last 6 quarters and the tax rate information off of your annual Tax Rate Notice from the TWC to get a tax rate estimate. With that estimated tax rate, you can compare it to your previous TWC reports and see the change that will occur in the Texas unemployment taxes that you will pay based on that one employee receiving unemployment benefits. Remember as you make that comparison that your tax rate increase will be effective for three years, not just one, after an employee files a successful unemployment claim.