On January 20, 2016, Secretary Perez selected 15 members and a Special Agency Liaison to serve on the Maritime Advisory Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (MACOSH). On April 29, 2015, the Secretary of Labor previously announced the renewal of MACOSH, and the MACOSH charter was signed on April 30, 2015, with an expiration date after [...]
President Obama’s proposed FY 2017 budget would impose increases in state and federal unemployment taxes estimated by the US Treasury to total $63 billion over the next ten years and make the increased tax base permanent and indexed. See https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents/General-Explanations-FY2017.pdf for details. Building on the FY 2016 proposal, the budget includes an increase in the FUTA [...]
On March 4, 2016 from 2:00 to 5:00 the National Advisory Committee on Safety and Health will meeting in Room N–5437A, Conference Rooms A–B, U.S. Department of Labor, 200 Constitution Avenue NW., Washington, DC 20210. to consider and make recommendations on OSHA’s draft Safety and Health Program Management Guidelines. The draft guidelines may be found at [...]
The following new and significant items related to workers compensation were included in the President’s Budget proposal for FY 2017 Social Security Administration The budget re-proposes the development of a process to collect workers’ compensation (WC) information in a timely manner from states and private insurers in order to correctly offset SSDI benefits and reduce SSI [...]
On February 24, 2016 President Obama signed into law the Trade “Customs” bill otherwise known as the “Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015’’. The full text of the Act as signed by the President. This legislation was the last of a series of trade related bills that were enacted in 2015. The Senate passed [...]
The Obama FY 2017 proposes once again to address “misclassification” of employee issues and independent contractor issues, citing not only the need for uniformity for federal employment tax administration, reporting and enforcement, but also for state based determinations for unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation purposes. See https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents/General-Explanations-FY2017.pdf for details. The proposal seeks a single federally determined [...]
On Friday, December 18, 2015, the President signed into law H.R. 2029 – the “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016,” which provides fiscal year 2016 full-year appropriations through September 30, 2016 for all agencies. See text at https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-114hr2029enr/pdf/BILLS-114hr2029enr.pdf. The Act included two provisions of note related to unemployment compensation or workers’ compensation. Workforce Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) Extension [...]
In very quick order the House passed this morning and the Senate passed H.R 2029, the Omnibus appropriations and tax extenders bill, and sent the bill to the President for his signature. The President has said he will sign the bill. The two pieces of the bill addressing tax extenders provisions and appropriations were negotiated together. [...]
Denver, Colo.--The CACI Board of Directors this week voted to oppose Amendment 69, a ballot initiative that would create a state governmental universal health-care system that would mandate $25 billion in new taxes on workers, employers and taxpayers in its first full year of implementation. The system would be called ColoradoCare. Amendment 69 has been approved [...]
The US Department of Labor has released its determinations with respect to the FUTA offset credit, BCR Waiver Requests, and FUTA rates for 2015. FUTA taxes in Connecticut are the highest in the country at $189 per employee instead of the normal $42 per employee because the state chose not to request a waiver of the [...]