A recent study by Littler Mendelson showed that although those in charge of human resource management remain concerned about the Affordable Care Act, their biggest fear has now become increased regulations by the federal government.

According to HR Morning, some of these fears might be due to the added regulations this year having to do with the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), along with increased monitoring of employee/contractor misclassification.

In a separate survey by Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. reported by Business Insurance, the same fears of regulation cropped up, although 63 percent of respondents were also concerned about the rising cost of health care benefits programs.

How to deal with the FMLA
The fears that a government agent will perform an audit of a company’s compliance with FMLA rules are well-founded, according to HR Benefits Alert. The federal government has recently grown much more nit-picky about what it considers a violation of the FMLA.

However, companies can prepare themselves by knowing in advance what the feds have begun looking for in particular. Typically, what happens is a company will mistakenly do something it believes is unrelated to the FMLA, and the federal government, upon auditing the company, will find a connection. In one case, a company would fire employees who did not fill out their medical histories in a timely way. However, the medical histories included questions that were not considered permissible to ask in accordance with FMLA rules.

In another case, a company failed to provide someone with notification of her FMLA rights after asking for leave to take care of a very ill child. Additionally, the company fired the woman for taking too much time off, even though this leave was permissible under FMLA. In a separate example, a company fulfilled an FMLA request to take leave, then failed to return the employee to his job because he wasn’t told he needed to complete a fitness-for-duty medical exam in order to come back to work.

Finally, one company failed to allow an FMLA request to pass because the worker was standing in loco parentis, meaning she was acting in the place of a parent. When a woman was fired for taking time off to take care of her niece, she was acting in place of a parent, but her FMLA request was denied.

It is likely the above companies did not intentionally try to game the rules, but even simple oversights can cause costly lawsuits. It is always more effective to pay attention to a company’s employee management system to ensure compliance and prevent problems before they happen. Whatever human resource solution a company uses, it must ensure these are compliant with the most recent interpretations of the federal law.

This blog post was originally published by the Sage HRMS team.