As you know, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) permits eligible employees of covered employers to take unpaid, job-protected leave for specific family and medical reasons. We’ve previously discussed six common FMLA leave request errors that can trigger lawsuits.

This August, the Department of Labor (DOL) and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced their specific areas of focus on FMLA and reasonable accommodation enforcement for 2015 through 2016. Jeff Nowak, an employment law attorney and the author of the blog FMLAInsights.com, offered some important takeaways.

In 2013, Gartner predicted that, in light of potential security breaches in single sign-on (SSO) systems, federated single sign-on would be the predominant SSO technology through 2016. Sharing information across multiple entities and trust domains, federated identity management (IAM), such as SSO, allows identity attributes to be transferred from one trusted identifying and authenticating entity to another for authentication and authorization purposes. Simply put, federated IAM SSO provides convenient and efficient system access to identified individuals.

It’s time to update the latest in timesheet fraud. You’d think that after years of splashy headlines, employees would know better than to cheat their employers in such big yet obvious ways. But no. Apparently they have not.

 

 

1. Lax Supervision in the U.S. Patent Office Emboldens Timesheet Fraud

 

It was all so promising. An award-winning telework program for the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), started in 1998, worked like a dream. Building step by step, it expanded slowly over time. Eventually saving big dollars in gas costs for employees. It significantly reduced the cost of employee space. It made it far easier to attract and retain higher-powered patent examiners and attorneys who, avoiding lengthy commutes, could now work from outside a 50-mile radius from headquarters.  According to Danette R. Campbell, senior advisor for telework in the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer at USPTO, by 2013, 3,464 teleworkers “working from home four to five days a week save $5,220,102 in gas per year and reduce emissions by 20,957 tons per year. More than 3,000 teleworkers who work from home one day a week save $1,033,824 in gas per year and reduce emissions by 4,150 tons per year.”

In August 2014, the Washington Post reported several issues with the program. It turns out an internal investigation discovered that these employees were poorly supervised. In some cases, union rules limiting supervisor’s oversight of their employees was to blame.

Single sign-on (SSO) was popularized in the early 2000’s as a way to make it easier for users to log into applications. User portals, where once they logged in, would grant users access to many applications. Today, security concerns and increased user mobility, that so many workers do their work outside company facilities and firewalls, has demanded a new approach. Identity and access management systems seem to be providing answers.

In this article, we feature three leaders in this space: Ping Identity, Okta and OneLogin. Pacific Timesheet is certified and integrates with all three vendors using the SAML 2.0 interface. 

OSHA OSHA OSHA

OSHA is a highly charged topic.

And it might be a poor choice to start a safety tips article with OSHA.

But really, OSHA is the beginning, the middle and the end for worker safety.

OSHA Rules and Guidelines

Maybe you've thought timesheet fraud was a victimless crime. Think again.

For all we spent and committed to the Iraq war -

• 1.5 million soldiers deployed over eight years
• Nearly 4,500 dead
• 32,000 wounded
• More than 300,000 with post traumatic stress and brain injuries
• More than 3 Trillion plus dollars on equipment, materials, and
• An ever-growing price tag in the billions to be spent providing care for soliders' permanent disabilities over the remainder of their lives

- we almost lost the country of Iraq to Islamic militants because of timesheet fraud.  

The stakes were about as high as they get.

The story starts with ISIS (The Islamic State), a terrorist group so heinous that they've been DISAVOWED by Al-Qaeda, the folks who brought us the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks.

This article is arranged for you to have an efficient experience: the tips are first, followed by some supporting research, and then discussion about Employee Appreciation Day and its creator, Dr. Bob Nelson.

5 Employee Recognition Tips

1. Recognize when an employee does something well - in other words, a specific task or project.
   
   
2. Make recognition part of your work culture, meaning that it happens frequently and make it easy to do.
   
   
3. Make sure it happens in a fair and balanced way, meaning that it isn’t a politically-based activity where the manager plays favorites and only a few of your employees are ever recognized.

OSHA's top 10 cited violations for 2014 won't surprise you if you work in construction, field services or manufacturing sectors. They consistently keep recurring year after year. However, there has been significant drop year over year in the total number of worker fatalties. If 

According to OSHA, overall, before the ganization was created 43 years ago, about 14,000 worker fatalities occurred each year in the United States. Daily worker fatalities have since fallen from 38 to 20 per day. 

Now, if you had to guess which violations remain at the top of the list, which would they be?

Rules that try to protect pregnant female workers are more than confusing. There are conflicting and often overlapping laws and rules at the federal level. But worse, each state has its own rules and protections, or lack thereof. So if you are operating in multiple states keeping track of all this, and changes to state laws, is not a trivial task.

Worse yet, not complying with these laws is getting more expensive. The number of legal claims filed each year is increasing, and  continues to increase. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) reported that claims increased 71% between 1992 and 2011.

However, The Department of Labor is here to save the day!

Running payroll can be a complex process made more so by the need to be in full compliance with both state and federal labor and tax laws. No one wants to be audited by the IRS, or sued by state or federal labor departments, so it’s a good idea to keep payroll errors to a minimum. Especially those errors that are difficult to catch.

 Below are six common payroll errors, that fortunately are not that difficult to fix.

1. Misclassifying Employees

Misclassifying a worker as an independent contractor rather than as an employee.

This is big mistake of course because of the possible reclassification that might come later on. If and when that happens, you are responsible for paying employment taxes, handling back withholdings and will no doubt have to pay fines and interest penalties. If you can't demonstrate proper reasons for classifying them as an independent contractor that meet IRS criteria, you might be in for a world of hurt with the IRS. Internal Revenue Code section 3509 covers this scenario. You can read more about the details of an employer's liability at the Cornell University site. The keys to understanding whether a worker is an independent contractor or an employee mostly have to do with control and independence.