Overall, 56 percent of those surveyed reported that they had enacted both hiring and salary freezes in response to the economic downturn.

Thirty-five percent of the 201 large firms in the survey said they planned to reverse reductions in 401(k) salary matches, while a whopping 96 percent said they had extended job offers in the past three months.

On the down side, one-fifth indicated they would conduct layoffs in the coming months.

Nonetheless, a Medicaid payment processor in California named CalOptima has mostly complied with the breach rule after the company discovered the loss of claims forms for some 68,000 persons. The digitized forms contained personally identifying information on the 68,000 and were lost during shipment by the United States Postal Service.

CalOptima has posted a breach notification on its Web site and also has notified federal and state agencies. The company says it will also notify each of the 68,000 affected individuals. The postal service, for its part, says it will continue to search for the missing data disks.

It is unclear whether CalOptima also notified the media of the breach, which is required when a data loss affects 500 or more people.

Employers who offer health insurance are covered by both HIPAA and the new breach rule, so you may want to sign up for Personnel Concepts’ HIPAA Compliance Poster and Subscription Service to keep yourselves and your employees informed of all rights and responsibilities.

POSTSCRIPT: The missing CDs with encrypted data later were found at a secure postal facility in Atlanta, apparently untampered with. CalOptima subsequently scrapped its plan to mail out individual breach notices to the 68,000 affected individuals.

Under the plan, the nurses went from $22.83 an hour for 8 hours to $19.57 for 12 hours. However, for the 12-hour shifts, they would be paid time-and-a-half for hours nine through twelve and double-time thereafter. The goal was to keep the 12-hour shifts revenue neutral when weighed against the 8-hour pay scale.

Even after the nurses later joined the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and negotiated a higher hourly rate, the union certified the same 12-hour, revenue-neutral scheme in its collective bargaining agreement.

Everyone was happy to be working fewer days and making the same money as before, until….

A nurse named Louise Parth, who had originally voted in favor of the plan, filed a class action claim on the grounds that the hospital’s approach violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by paying nurses working 8-hour shifts more per hour than those working 12-hour shifts, alleging that it was all a scheme to avoid paying overtime.

A district court heard arguments and granted summary judgment in favor of the hospital. Parth appealed, but the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the district court and dismissed the claim.

The Circuit Court’s opinion was based on an earlier decision by the Supreme Court that ratified such schemes.

After the FLSA was enacted in 1938, many employers altered their compensation schemes—by lowering base hourly rates—to ensure that they paid employees the same overall wages after complying with the FLSA’s overtime requirements, but the Supreme Court had already examined these practices in Walling v. A. H. Belo Corp. (1942) 316 U.S. 624 and ruled that even when the employer’s purpose in lowering hourly base rates “was to permit as far as possible the payment of the same total weekly wage after the [FLSA] as before…nothing in the [FLSA] bars an employer from contracting with his employees to pay them the same wages that they received previously, so long as the new rate equals or exceeds the minimum required by the [FLSA].”

Employers, to help you understand overtime pay requirements under the FLSA, Personnel Concepts has developed its comprehensive but easy-to-implement FLSA Overtime Rules Compliance Kit.

Complete report available here.

The Feds specifically gigged the agency for not issuing more willful violations, noting that its only willful violation citation was later reduced to non-willful, and for not following up on corrective measures mandated on companies that violated OSHA standards.

Nevada OSHA officials claim that willful violations had proven so hard to win in court that they had become reluctant to issue such citations, but they promised a review of their procedures.

Nevada OSHA officials further acknowledged at a news conference Tuesday (Oct. 20, 2009) that they need to make improvements, including in their overall approach to workplace hazards.

“Looking back, we should have taken a more aggressive approach,” said Donald Jayne, the new head of the state Industrial Relations Division, which oversees the agency. “That’s an easy call.”

In light of its probe in Nevada, Fed/OSHA is now planning to examine other states’ programs as well. It’s still possible that the federal agency may also take the dramatic and previously unused step of assuming control of the state OSH Agency.

“The safety of workers must be priority one, and the U.S. Department of Labor is stepping up its review of state OSHA plans to ensure that is the case,” Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said.

The investigation sprang in large part from a Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé by the Las Vegas Sun. It was the most thorough investigation of a state agency conducted in two decades, according to officials.

With the annual "tax gap" between what’s owed and what’s paid estimated at $290 billion, the Internal Revenue Service is siccing its agents on 5,000 randomly selected employers beginning in November 2009 as much for a learning lesson as a collections effort.

The IRS is publicly calling this a National Research Program (NRP) to downplay the collections aspect, but the research itself will be employed to create more functional compliance and collection programs.

The NRP will focus on four areas: worker classification, fringe benefits, reimbursed expenses and owner compensation. The worker classification test will be for independent contractors to determine if a company is improperly classifying employees as independent contractors to save fringe compensation and to shift the tax burden onto the misclassified contractor.

In September 2009, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report urging the Department of Labor (DOL) and IRS to increase “their efforts to probe the improper classification of workers” as independent contractors, educate employers and use penalties to deter misclassification. The GAO was particularly critical of the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division for its very limited enforcement activity.

If your company is targeted, expect an IRS audit of your W2s and other wage records as well.

The Bush-era "no match" rule gave employers three months to straighten out mismatched employee Social Security numbers or immigration documents that conflicted with what’s on record in D.C. After three months, the employers would have to fire those employees who couldn’t produce evidence of proper documentation (presumably because they’re using fake documents and numbers to cover up their illegal immigrant status).

Predictably for the Obama administration, the "no match" reversal was hailed by union supporters, which is somewhat ironic since unions just as predictably fear lower-cost labor as represented by undocumented workers, but the unions are engaging in a trade-off for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

"The no-match program was a flawed and ineffective enforcement tool that would have hurt U.S. citizens and other authorized workers," said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO.

No doubt.

As for the E-Verify extension that has long been opposed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups (that rely on undocumented workers for cheap labor), even those who might otherwise cheer the extension saw a Trojan Horse in its midst.

Said a statement by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the extension is "further evidence of the Obama administration’s and the congressional leadership’s effort to raise a smokescreen while it dismantles all effective controls against illegal immigration."

No doubt.

Stay tuned to see what’s really going to transpire on the immigration front, provided the health care reform front ever recedes from center stage.

The number of U.S. employers who check up on absent workers declined to 29 percent this year from 31 percent last year and 35 percent the year before, the research showed.

However, employers this year are turning the other cheek more than before, metaphorically speaking, because they believe stress and burnout from the challenges and aftershocks of the economic meltdown are playing a role.

Or could it be the revenge of Ferris Bueller?

More likely the latter.

On the first issue, the courts sided with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) in allowing the contractor mandate to go forward. On the second issue, the Senate passed a last-minute bill to fund E-Verify through Oct. 31 when a yearlong funding bill for the parent Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is expected to pass and extend E-Verify authorization indefinitely.

Since the Sept. 8 implementation of the E-Verify mandate, contractors have been seeking clarification, and over the weeks USCIS has obliged them by posting answers to common questions. Here’s what they’ve said:

Who’s affected by the rule? Any entity accepting a federal contract on or after Sept. 8, 2009, with a length of 120 days or more and a value of $100,000 or more must use E-Verify to certify its employees’ legal status to work in the United States. The same goes for subcontractors meeting the same conditions but with contract values of $3,000 or more. The rule does not apply to contracts for off-the-shelf procurement.

Which employees must be verified? The simple answer is all of them, both existing and new hires.

When do we have to enroll in E-Verify? Once you sign a federal contract, you have 30 days to enroll in E-Verify. Then you have 90 days to complete the verification process for your workforce.

What if we already have a federal contract we’re working on? Then the rule doesn’t apply. The E-Verify Contractor Rule applies only to contracts issued with the E-Verify written notification on or after Sept. 8, 2009.

What if we’re already enrolled in E-Verify? You’re fine except you must check your profile to ensure that your business is listed as a "federal contractor." If not, then update your profile to include that specification.

What does it cost to enroll in E-Verify? The system is completely free and relies on databases at the DHS and the Social Security Administration to verify legal residency status and Social Security Numbers.

Which looks to me like a ploy to eliminate the middle man, an assistant secretary of Labor, but I have no insider knowledge of DOL politics.

Anyway, the four agencies now to report directly are the Wage and Hour Division (WHD), the Office of Labor Management Standards (OLMS), the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) and the Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs (OWCP). WHD is the group that busts you for not paying overtime and for committing other wage thefts.

Let’s look at one of those methods: Say Employer A sends 20 hourly employees to training on a Saturday. He calls it “voluntary,” but the employees sense that they’d better go or suffer the consequences.

Calling it “voluntary” and “off the clock,” Business A Head Owner Guy says he doesn’t have to pay overtime for the extra day of work beyond 40 hours that week.

What does the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act) and DOL say?

Wrong! Since the employees felt pressure to attend, and since the benefits of their attending fell mainly on the company, all 20 of them deserve time-and-a-half for the training.

Let’s put it this way: About the only way an employer can send employees to training and avoid paying them is to say something like, “Okay, go study whatever you like this weekend and I’ll pay for it.” The workers head off to yoga, meditation, screenwriting and start-your-own-business classes voluntarily and without benefit primarily to the company. Since Head Boss is a Nice Guy, he doesn’t have to pay them overtime.

For more information, check out the white paper.