Tag Archives: Documentation

How Employers Can Do Everything Right

Discrimination, Documentation, Litigation, Management, Termination, Training, , , ,

University Medical Center in Lubbock won a big victory in an age discrimination case by doing everything right (suggesting to me that they followed the advice of their employment lawyers). Employers can learn eight important lessons from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision issued in the case of Salazar v. Lubbock County Hospital District d/b/a University Medical Center (opinion issued December 7, 2020).

Age discrimination cases are difficult for employers to win because the elderly make very sympathetic plaintiffs and the judges and jurors themselves are often older. But this case gives a blueprint to managers of how to dispassionately and carefully handle the termination of a poor-performing employee.

The allegations that plaintiff Rosemary Salazar asserted in this case sound really bad for the employer in an age-discrimination claim. Salazar had worked at the hospital for 27 years before she was fired in 2017 for poor performance and failure to change her behavior. She was 57 years old at the time of her termination and alleged not only was her firing discriminatory, but also that the same supervisor in her department fired three other long-time employees who were over the age of 60.

Salazar also claimed that she had been given good performance evaluations and that she had “received numerous raises for her job performance.” Finally she said that the employer did not follow its own progressive disciplinary policy in terminating her.

How did UMC manage to get a win the summary judgment motion and the appeal in this case? In a word: documentation.

Continue reading How Employers Can Do Everything Right →

Employers Must Use Revised I-9 Form Beginning September 18

Documentation, Hiring, , , ,

The very important I-9 form, which verifies a new employee’s identity and eligibility to work in the United States, has been revised again. Employers must start using the revised form on September 18, 2017.

The revision, marked “07/17/17 N” and carrying an expiration date of 08/31/19, has to be completed only by new hires. You do not have to go back and get all of your current employees to recomplete an I-9 just because the form changed after their hire date.

Employers must complete an I-9 form on each new employee within 3 days of hiring. This process started in 1986 as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which prohibits employers from taking on a new employee without verifying the employee’s identification and eligibility to work legally in the United States.

The verification is done by reviewing the employee’s identification and employment eligibility documents, such as a passport, a permanent resident card, or a driver’s license and social security card, and completing the I-9 form. There is a very helpful employer’s guide available online that shows you what a valid document is supposed to look like. Doing your due diligence requires that you consult that guide each time you look at a new employee’s documents.

Because of the views of the current administration, employers can expect an increase in enforcement of immigration laws, including more frequent ICE audits of your I-9 compliance. There are expensive penalties if you as an employer cannot produce accurately completed I-9 forms for each of your current and former employees.

The minimum fine is $216 per error on an I-9 and the maximum is $2,156 per error (including current employees and former employees) for each paperwork violation. That means that a single I-9 form which has multiple errors could cause the employer to be responsible for multiple penalties per form. If ICE determines that the employer has failed to accurately complete I-9s on at least 50% of its employees, the maximum fine of $2,156 will be levied on the employer for each form.

You must keep an I-9 form on every active employee as long as the employee works for you. For a terminated employee, you must be able to produce an I-9 for three years after the hire date or one year after termination, whichever is later. To make it easier to remember, most employers wait to purge I-9 forms until three years after an employee’s termination.

Typically, when ICE appears for an I-9 audit, they will require that you produce I-9 forms for each current employee and any employee terminated in the last three years. You are given 72-hours’ notice to pull all of these forms together, which is why many employers store the I-9 forms together rather than in each employee’s individual file.

2017 New Year’s Resolutions for Employers

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At the beginning of each year, I encourage my business clients to make some New Year’s resolutions to achieve better compliance with the myriad employment laws. Based on what many of my clients are telling me and what the courts and enforcement agencies have on their agendas, here are the employment matters that you could improve in 2017:

  • Immigration compliance: President-Elect Trump has promised strong enforcement of the immigration laws. Many of those enforcement efforts will affect employers, such as mandatory use of the E-Verify system to double-check the legal status of every new hire. Even before that requirement is put in to place, resolve to correctly complete the mandatory new I-9 form for every new hire. The best way to make sure the I-9 is correctly completed: consult the government-published Employer’s Guide to the I-9, particularly the color pictures that show you exactly what a valid permanent resident card, for example, looks like. Also, be prepared that some of your employees may lose their work eligibility under the new administration, including young people (known as the Dreamers) who became eligible under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012.
  • Market rate on salaries: Texas’ unemployment rate was sitting at 4.6% at the end of November 2016. Amarillo’s rate was 3.0%. Economists consider 3% to be full employment, meaning you as an employer maybe finding it difficult to attract and keep the talent that you need. I am always surprised therefore when my clients don’t keep up with the market data on salaries. Resolve in 2016 to tap into the data available on the Bureau of Labor Statistics for your industry and your location to really analyze whether your salaries are sufficient. Employees will also be looking at Salary.com and Payscale.com, so you need to do the same.
  • Improve your PTO offering: I am amazed when I am drafting or revising my client’s employment handbooks how little paid time off many local employers offer. Many don’t give an employee any vacation, sick leave, personal days or other paid time off during the first year and then rarely allow more than five days per year after that. This will not attract top talent or create long-term loyal employees, I promise you. Particularly if you are hiring millennials or need an educated workforce, you need to up your game on PTO. My 22-year-old son was hired in 2015 by a consulting firm in Washington, D.C., right out of college (with a degree in economics and a master’s degree in business analytics) and offered three weeks of PTO that started accruing immediately. After one promotion, employees at his company get four weeks of PTO. I’m not arguing that every job merits that much PTO, but resolve in 2017 to at least consider that two weeks per year should be the minimum to improve your hiring, increase your retention, rejuvenate your employees every year and allow your employees to deal with the inevitable ups and downs of life. As an employment lawyer, I know that most employee lawsuits arise after the worker leaves your employ. Keeping your staff reasonably happy and loyal by providing better PTO will provide you with other benefits too, but I like it because you will spend less time with me in court and instead we can just have lunch and talk about more pleasant topics.
  • Health Reimbursement Accounts: None of us know what the new administration will create to replace the Affordable Care Act, so I can’t give you much advice yet about your group health insurance offerings. However, employers with less than 50 employees who don’t offer group health insurance should resolve to consider using Health Reimbursement Accounts in 2017 because of the bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act that sailed through Congress and the President’s signature in December. That act included permission for small employers to now use HRA’s to pay for qualified out-of-pocket medical expenses for their employees and to fund individual health insurance premiums. In other words, employers can use pretax dollars to help employees to purchase their own insurance on the open market while capping the employer’s contribution at a reasonable amount. There are, of course, many restrictions associated with this opportunity, but it is worth consideration by smaller employers in 2017.
  • Good Documentation: Every employment lawyer would like for you to add this to your resolution list each year. Memories fail and managers move on, so written documents are often an employer’s only evidence of the nondiscriminatory reasons that certain employment actions were taken. Understand and resolve that performance reviews, reasons for bonuses and merit increases, violations of policy, attendance problems, changes in job duties and disciplinary actions will be well-documented in 2017. I’ll help with any of kind of documentation, but I highly recommend that you get me involved whenever the documentation is of disability or religious accommodations, FMLA, harassment claims, overtime or other compensation problems, egregious policy violations, demotions, final warnings, layoffs and terminations.
  • Gratitude: Resolve that you will say “thank you” more often to your employees in 2017. Studies have repeatedly shown that this one action can enhance employee engagement and loyalty even more than raises and promotions. Gratitude can also make your workplace so much more enjoyable for all of your employees.