Paying Salary; Does it Add Up?

Paying an employee salary instead of hourly is just easier, right?! No more dealing with figuring and paying overtime and turning in time cards.

Actually, legally some employees that you may want to pay salary may still be entitled to overtime pay and unpaid meal breaks.

Interested in paying your employee salary

In order to stay compliant by classifying employees correctly, first you'll need to determine if the employee is exempt or non-exempt. Exempt simply means that they are exempt from certain wage laws such as paying overtime.

Curbing Driving Liabilities

If an employee is driving a company vehicle, there are additional vehicle liability risks the you should be aware of. This includes, but is not limited to, vehicle insurance coverage. If an employee is driving any company vehicle we advise you to check with your insurer to review coverage details.

We have two great tools Cardinal provides to help curb driving liabilities:

 
DMV Check

Cardinal reviews a Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) Drivers Record Printout on all employees that will be driving while on the clock. This driving record will show a list of all DMV related activity and your potential driver's record will be resulted as either and "A", "B", or "C" depending on the amount of negative driving activity found on the record.


DMV Flag
In addition to the DMV Check, Cardinal does report current drivers to Department of Motor Vehicles Automated Reporting System (ARS). ARS is a service provided to employers with drivers under their employment.  This service produces and sends the employer a court print driving record when a conviction, accident, or suspension is posted to one of their employee's records.

You will be notified down the road if an active driver suddenly has a driving record that does not pass the safe driving standard. If Cardinal has concerns with a driving record we will contact and review the results of our check with you.




We do not offer coverage for vehicle insurance liabilities.

Travel Time: Paid vs. Unpaid

Think of all the driving that your employee may do in a day. Driving to work, running errands, jobs or maybe training attended out of town, ... Which in all these situations are employers required to pay as travel time?! 

There are 4 different categories of travel time ….

• Portal-to-portal
• Travel between work sites
• Special one-day assignments
• Overnight travel

Who Is Scanning Your Email?

Google and Yahoo have recently admitted that they scan user's email to make their advertising more relevant. Google points out that “no humans read your email” but it is not clear what limits there are on these companies’ ability to use the information they receive. Their terms of use agreements provide some direction but appear to offer wiggle room on what can be done with your content in their system.  It is reasonable to have these concerns with other free email providers as well.

Cardinal is very concerned about information security, primarily with documents that contain sensitive information like a Social Security Number or date of birth.  We are rolling out our new employer site and one of the planned upgrades is to allow clients to directly upload documents into our secure server.  This will bypass the need to send Cardinal sensitive documents by email. In the mean time we advise not utilizing any service that may store sensitive information outside of your control.

Quirky Work Time

It seems like it would be straight forward but in the real-world of employment there are some quirky circumstances! It can be confusing and you may end up unsure if you need to pay an employee or not. Learn the rules behind what the law considers Paid Time. 

Working Time

Under federal and state rules, ‘hours worked’ includes both time worked and time of authorized attendance. This means that you must pay for anytime an employee performs work, whether the work was authorized or not. This includes work performed away form the job site or even at home.

Wellness and the Affordable Care Act

There are plenty of conversations about the rise in health insurance rates.  Politicians on both sides debate the merits of the ACA and its role, or lack of a role, in shaping the direction of health care costs.  Health care providers, insurance companies and malpractice attorneys are just a few of those taking some or all of the blame for rising rates.

Legal Update 2014 - Part 2

At the Federal level there are two big items related to labor law.  

The first is in regards to a Supreme Court ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  The court ruled that benefits must be extended to same sex couples if the state they reside in recognizes same sex marriages.  What is unclear is how that applies in states that do not recognize same sex marriages.  Even more unclear is if a same sex couple gets married in a state that recognizes same sex marriages but lives and works in a state that does not.  Since the ruling on DOMA focuses on benefits, like health insurance or 401(k) plans, you should contact the administrator of those benefits and ask about the criteria they have set.  Then update your employee handbook to match their advice.