H-1B season opening soon:  Beginning March 6, 2024, U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) will conduct its annual H-1B Cap Lottery to award H-1B slots for professional workers in specialty occupations. There are a total of 85,000 visas available each year, including 20,000 slots reserved for candidates who earned a master’s degree or higher from a U.S. educational institution. To allocate these limited slots, USCIS conducts an annual lottery to randomly select which employees may be sponsored for H-1B status. This year, H-1B cap registrations may be submitted from 12:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, March 6 through 12:00 p.m. ET on Friday, March 22. To address issues of fraud and misuse, USCIS has announced changes to the registration process. USCIS will begin using passport numbers or travel document numbers to select lottery registrations, meaning that each beneficiary will be entered into the lottery only once, regardless of the number of registrations submitted on their behalf. If a beneficiary is selected, all employers who filed a registration will be notified and eligible to file an H-1B petition on behalf of the beneficiary.  Source:  Holland & Knight LLP 2/2/24

Next wave of lawsuits – mismanaging health care premiums:  The New York City Law Firm Fairmark Partners is investigating filing a class action lawsuit against aerospace company Lockheed Martin regarding its handling of employee healthcare premium contributions. As a result, the law firm is soliciting feedback from current and former Lockheed Martin employees on the TopClassActions website.  Fairmark cites dramatically increasing healthcare costs as the impetus for its investigation, forecasting that 2024 will bring the largest cost increase in decades. According to Fairmark, Lockheed Martin and other large corporations are passing on these massive increases in healthcare costs to their employees, which amount to about $1 trillion annually. More specifically, Fairmark is asking current and former Lockheed Martin employees the following about healthcare coverage while employed with Lockheed:  Whether they fully understood the costs and increases in their Lockheed Martin plan when they signed up; if they don’t know how Lockheed uses the funds it collects for healthcare premiums; if they feel as if they are getting what they pay for; and if their raises are negatively impacted by the increased costs of their healthcare premiums.  Assuming they do file a lawsuit, employers beware.  This is a new avenue for plaintiff’s attorneys.  Source: Hall Benefits Law 1/30/24

Are you making mistakes in open enrollment? Benefits brokerage Nava Benefits audited over 600 insurance carrier bills charged to their employer clients, finding that 90% had enrollment errors. While some were damaging financially — the employer was paying for workers who weren't actually enrolled in healthcare benefits — others negatively impacted the company's reputation: Workers who had chosen to be on their employer's plan weren't enrolled, and now can't access care. "We started to dig further into this because we heard from employers and HR teams that they audited one random carrier bill, and there were five big things wrong, costing them $10,000 every month," says Brandon Weber, co-founder and CEO of Nava. "Now we've run into situations where a not-very-large employer is actually paying $200,000 a year in insurance bill costs that they shouldn't have paid."  Collectively, employers may be losing billions of dollars in open enrollment mistakes made by carriers, underlines Weber. And while errors that involve leaving out employees seem less costly, Weber notes that it hurts the employer's relationship with their workers.  So how do you audit your enrollment, especially with healthcare costs expected to rise greatly in the coming years?  Source:  EBN 1/31/24

Mental health issues at the center for increasing leave requests: Based on the  2024 Leave of Absence and Workplace Accommodations Survey by AbsenceSoft, a leave management software company, most (62%) HR managers are seeing an increase in leave requests. Of those who reported an increase, 75% saw the number of leave requests increase by 20% or more. When we asked if accommodations requests had risen during the past year, 75% said they had. Of those employers that reported an increase in requests, 74% reported handling 20% or more requests than the prior year. All of this adds to a rapidly growing caseload of incoming requests for HR teams.  Per the report, the main reasons employees gave for requesting leave, mental health challenges topped the list, even above illness and injuries, caring for a loved one, or parental leave. Leave and workplace accommodations continue to rise as workforce expectations evolve rapidly. With recruitment and retention topping the list of organizational challenges, companies are adding more leave benefits to attract and retain talent.  Source:  AbsenceSoft 1/23/24

Job applicants and employees must be given the Summary of Consumer Rights Form in certain circumstances after credit and background checks:  Employers and consumer reporting agencies (CRAs) should take note that the mandatory compliance deadline to implement the updated Summary of Consumer Rights Form (officially titled "A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act") is quickly approaching on March 20, 2024. The new version of the form, which was initially published by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in March 2023, is required by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) to be provided to applicants and employees before any adverse action is taken on the basis of a background check and with every pre-adverse action notice. The CFPB has provided versions of the updated form in English and Spanish.