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So you listened to your friends and advisors and finally established your company’s presence on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  Now you can control your company’s web presence, right?

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Well, that’s a relief.  The employer mandate for 100+ employee companies has been pushed back to 2015 and 50+ employee companies to 2016. No worries until then, right?

Unless you’re the guy who keeps kicking the can down the road hoping that something changes, you’re wrong. There’s a pretty good business book written by Rick Page called Hope is not a Strategy. I’m amazed at how many savvy business owners seem to think that it can be.

The simple truth of the matter is that the Affordable Care Act has changed everything you know or have ever known about health insurance. In fact, it’s completely changed the game. If you think you’ve protected yourself by getting grandfathered in, you’re just going to trip over that same can later.

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According to a recent article in Bloomberg’s Business News, HR departments are going to become increasingly busy over the next 12 to 18 months.  Why?  Because of a recent memorandum that was issued by the White House to the Department of Labor to “modernize and streamline overtime regulations and make more workers eligible under federal law.”

Burning the midnight oil might be more valuable for exempt employees in the near future.

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Ahhhh---feel the ocean breeze blowing through your hair, your toes digging into the sand, and the cool drink in your hand. Your computer is nowhere in sight. That’s right, you’re on vacation!

As an employee, taking time off is important. It keeps you focused, gives you a break and lets you spend some quality time with your family or friends. As a company, administering a paid time off (PTO) policy is also important, and much less relaxing than taking the time off. 

With traditional PTO and sick time plans, your company is trying define and limit the liability of paying an employee for time they didn’t work. Sounds simple. 

But how do you keep track of it all? Without a streamlined system it can be easy to miscalculate PTO for your employees. Miscalculations mean lost money for your company. According to a 2010 survey by Kronos conducted with Mercer, poorly planned absences cost U.S. organizations over 8% of their payroll each year.

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You’re looking to hire a new candidate or thinking about promoting an employee from within your company.

But before you take a step further you want to run a background check. What are the legal requirements and information you need to be aware of as an employer before you start this process? We do our best to give you an overview on the process below.

Information requested for a background check depends on the employer and the job involved. For some jobs, a state or federal law requires the employer to conduct a background check. Working with children, the elderly, or people with disabilities are examples of jobs that require a criminal background check. 

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Effective September 1, new withholding tables will result in increased take-home pay for Ohio workers.  Governor Kasich’s plan will lower the income tax rates 10% over the next three years with a majority of the decrease coming in 2013. In addition to the lower payroll withholding rates, small businesses will see tax savings of up to 50%.  And while that’s great for payroll and businesses, Ohio will also see an increase in sales tax by .25%.   

A brief description of the withholding rate change was released by Tax Commissioner Joe Testa on August 26^th, and can be found at: http://www.tax.ohio.gov/Portals/0/communications/news_releases/NR_TaxWithholdingCut.pdf.

The Department of taxation released an update of the sales rates on their website at:  http://www.tax.ohio.gov/sales_and_use/rate_changes.aspx.

Have questions? Leave a comment below or contact us at 330-659-0100!

Although it’s still warm and the swimming pools are still open throughout Ohio, you’ve probably already started thinking about what needs to be done to prepare for the cold months ahead.

This preparation for the inevitability of winter is a fact of life in this part of the country. Similarly, because you have some time to prepare for worker's compensation claims (it takes two years before a claim impacts your premium), you can prepare yourself to mitigate the cost and impact on your BWC premium.

Follow the tips below to protect yourself in the face of worker's compensation claims: 

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When I was little my mother always told me that “patience was a virtue”. That was always her response when my sister and I would bother her with the all too famous phrase of “Are we there yet?” during our annual family vacation trips. Little did I know that the phrase she would tell us would come in handy down the road in my career and more specifically, in the realm of unemployment claims management.

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President Obama’s administration has decided to delay enforcement of one of the key provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA): the Employer Mandate.

Mark Mazur, Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, posted on the White House’s Treasury blog on July 2. In this post, he announced that the administration has decided to postpone enforcement of the Employer Mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act by a full year.

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For several years, GMS has been paying Ohio local taxes via Ohio Business Gateway. This method has saved us from printing 1,500 checks annually and the paper forms to go along with them. In a single quarter, GMS will pay over 1.2 million dollars in local tax payments to 180 jurisdictions. But what’s more exciting is that we uploaded and processed our first live electronic returns & payments to the ODJFS (Ohio Department of Job and Family Services) for Q2, 2013.

What does this really mean?

• We sent the agency a deposit that exceeded 1 million dollars. 
• We avoided printing over 700 checks and the accompanying 1,800 sheets of additional paper. 
• We avoided the extravagant shipping charges for such a large package and secured the payments by uploading rather than the standard delivery method.
• We also no longer need to wait the typical 2-4 weeks for our returns to post, they are posted almost immediately. 
• And best of all, we were the first TPA contacted to work with ODJFS on this filing method. 

We’re very proud of the relationship we have with ODJFS and are happy to announce that we are now completely electronic with them. We get automated rate adjustments, automated tax notices and now electronic returns. If you have questions about your ODJFS account, please feel free to contact us at taxmail@groupmgmt.com.