Employee Benefits

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has given final approval to a $6.75 million settlement of a class action lawsuit filed by current and former LinkedIn employees regarding their investment options in the company 401(k) plan. The settlement covers more than 17,000 people participating in the company’s retirement plan from August 14, 2014, to July 1,

The U.S. Department of Labor has released the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Annual Adjustments for 2024. These adjustments apply to a wide range of benefit-related civil monetary penalties and to all penalties assessed after January 15, 2024, concerning violations that occurred after November 2, 2015.
The most notable penalty adjustments are as follows:

  • The penalty for failing

A federal court has preliminarily approved a $1 million settlement in a class action lawsuit between a large company and its former employees over allegations that its COBRA notice was threatening and misleading. The case is Blessinger v. Wells Fargo & Co., 2023 WL 8432223 (M.D. Fla. 2023).
The former employees filed a class action lawsuit against the employer, claiming that

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL)’s Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) has issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would rescind a 2018 DOL rule entitled “Definition of Employee – Association Health Plans,” or the 2018 AHP Rule. The purpose of the rule was to expand the availability of AHPs.
Before the 2018 AHP rule, a multiple employer welfare arrangement

The Internal Revenue Service, Employee Benefits Security Administration, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (collectively, “the Departments”) recently issued final rules concerning fees established by the No Surprises Act for the federal Independent Dispute Resolution (IDR) process. The Departments issued these rules through a notice and comment rulemaking process after a federal court overturned portions of the previous

In 2023, various federal government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), unveiled four significant rules concerning employee benefits.
DOL’s Proposed Fiduciary Rule
In late October, the Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) issued a proposed rule that would change the definition of an investment advice fiduciary under the Employee Retirement Income Security

The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has announced its first settlement of a HIPAA case involving a phishing cyberattack. In May 2021, Lafourche Medical Group, LLC, filed a HIPAA breach notification with OCR stating that a hacker had obtained electronic patient health information (ePHI) via a phishing cyberattack. OCR’s press release

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Fifth Circuit heard oral arguments in the federal government’s appeal of a U.S. District Court judge’s ruling invalidating Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which bans healthcare discrimination. The case is Neese v. Becerra, case number 23-10078, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
During oral

Congress passed the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 to encourage workers to save for retirement. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recently issued additional guidance on various provisions of the SECURE 2.0 Act in the form of IRS Notice 2024-2. Much of this guidance focuses on optional features that employers have been reluctant to utilize without further guidance from the

Bristol SL Holdings Inc. (“Bristol”), a holding company and successor-in-interest for Sure Haven, a now-bankrupt drug and alcohol treatment center, recently urged a panel of the Ninth Circuit to overturn the trial court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of insurance giant Cigna. Bristol sued Cigna in 2019, claiming that it violated the terms of its health plan when it