Last night (Wednesday, March 18, 2020) the President signed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act after it passed the Senate in the afternoon by a vote of 90-8. The Act requires all private health plans to cover COVID-19 diagnostic testing—coverage that most insured and large self-insured health plans already are providing. The Act also requires employers with fewer than 500 employees to provide up to ten weeks of paid FMLA leave and two weeks of paid sick leave to employees affected by COVID-19. For small employers subject to these new leave mandates, the Act provides tax credits to help offset the cost of the mandates. This means that the tax credits are not available to employers with 500 or more employees, even if they provide paid leave equal to or in excess of that required of smaller employers under the Act. It is noteworthy that the Senate voted down amendments that would have expanded the bill’s paid FMLA leave or replaced the bill’s paid leave with state unemployment benefits.
Continue Reading Impact of New Coronavirus Mandatory Leave and Testing Legislation Largely Limited to Smaller Employers
Corpus Linguistics and ERISA Litigation
On July 10, 2019, the Sixth Circuit considered vexing questions of statutory interpretation in an ERISA case. A dispute over whether a transaction bonus plan was an ERISA employee pension benefit plan hinged on the meaning of two terms common in federal statutes: “results in” and “extending to.” While the meaning of the statute was plain to the entire panel, Judges Stranch and Thapar quarreled over the evidence that a court might rightly consider when interpreting a statute—in this case, ERISA. Judge Thapar argues that “[c]ourts should consider adding [corpus linguistics] to their tool belts.”
Continue Reading Corpus Linguistics and ERISA Litigation
Retirement Savings as a Political Cudgel in the Debate over FTTs
Our own Richard Shea and Jack Lund recently contributed a post to the RetireSecure Blog maintained by the Pension Research Council of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. The post discusses the competing rhetoric surrounding the impact of proposed financial transaction taxes on the American retirement system.