Bloomberg BNA's Compensation Planning & Benefits Plus™ shares the experience of leading tax and ERISA practitioners making the complexity of employee benefits compliance, administration, and design more understandable for busy practitioners. The service offers access to up-to-date source materials, news, and expert commentary on trends and topics, as well as an array of practice tools.

Expert Analysis:

Health Care Reform Adviser — Understand the impact of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on your practice. The Adviser provides exceptional analysis on the tax, benefits, and insurance issues facing employers that offer employee health benefits and the penalties that apply to employers that do not offer adequate health benefits. Features include model policies, internal and external claims procedures, sample notices and forms and compliance flowcharts. This comprehensive Adviser is supported by links to relevant primary source information, including ERISA, labor and employment laws, the Public Health Service Act, final and proposed regulations and agency documents.
Major topics covered by the Health Care Reform Adviser include:

• Tax credits for small businesses
• Other tax incentives for employers
• Health insurance market reform
• Plan administration requirements
• Retiree health benefits
• State-based exchanges
• Group health plan insurance provisions
• Health plan design options
• Taxation of employees and individuals
• Implications for employer-sponsored health benefits
• HIPAA, COBRA and FMLA
• And many more.

The Health Care Reform Adviser was authored by Alden J. Bianchi, an authority on federal and state health care reform, the practice group leader of the Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Practice, and a member in the Employment, Labor & Benefits Section of Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.

Source Documents:

• ERISA
• Public Health Service Act
• Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and Amending Legislation
• Securities Statutes, Regulations, and Documents
• DOL & PBGC Regulations and Documents
• Health and Human Services Regulations and Documents
• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Documents
• National Association of Insurance Commissioners Documents
• Congressional Research Service Reports

News & Commentary:

Compensation Planning Journal — Take full advantage of practitioner-authored articles on complex topics, successful strategies and alerts to government actions and policy decisions from the Journal’s “Inside Washington” feature that you’ll find nowhere else. The Journal keeps you abreast of such wide-ranging compensation planning issues as qualified plan compliance, employment taxes, health care and other employee benefits, and nonqualified deferred compensation plans, including the impact of Section 409A. It includes practitioners' comments, reviews of benefit plans, and synopses of new developments.

Practice Tools:

• Health Care Reform Legislation Timelines — Track developments in connection with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, and amendments to the Public Health Service Act. Links to relevant sections of the Health Care Reform Adviser are provided as well as to primary source material.
• Tables, Charts and Lists
• Sample Forms and Notices
• Compliance Flowcharts
• Model Claims Procedures
• Sample Plans

Formats and Frequency
Available on the Web.
Health Care Reform Adviser is updated regularly.
The Compensation Planning Journal is issued monthly and archived on the Web.