HRMG Blog – Sage Abra Payroll, HR, & Timekeeping News

Beginning September 11th, Pennsylvania’s new Clean Indoor Air Act goes into effect. This act will ban smoking in public places as well as workplaces. With exception to the City of Philadelphia, this ban is statewide.

“Workplace” is defined as an indoor area serving as a place of employment, occupation, business, trade, craft, professional, or volunteer activity. Place of employment is defined as the area that an employee uses for work or any other purpose. This includes restrooms, stairways, garages, cafeterias, to name a few.

Implementing a smoke-free policy may not be at the top of your to-do list, but the fines for not implementing a policy and following through are costly. Owners, operators, or managers of premises may be penalized for failing to post proper signage in the amounts ranging from $250 to $1,000. Owners can also be fined $250-$1,000 for allowing smoking. Finally, persons (patrons or employees) may be penalized $250-1000 for smoking. What to do ASAP:

• Post “No Smoking” signs.
• Communicate and educate all employees that smoking is prohibited in the workplace.
• Address the violations and the fines imposed by law.
• Define how violations will be addressed.
• Address how to handle smoking during work breaks.
• Provide employees with a copy of the policy.

For additional pointers, the PA Department of Health has developed a great Compliance Toolkit for download here: Smoke-Free Compliance Toolkit. You can also visit www.PACTonline.org for signage or sample policies.

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Gov. Ed Rendell signed into law a bill that will streamline Pennsylvania’s local tax collection system. The new law (S.B. 1063) reduces municipal and school district Earned Income Tax collectors from 560 to 69. Essentially, one collector will be named for each county. The program will begin in 2010 and will be fully operational by 2012.

According to the Pennsylvania Economy League, Pennsylvania’s fractured and inefficient system left some $237 million uncollected each year, which would be enough to hire 3,000 more teachers and 3,000 more police officers, or lower property taxes. This bill, in essence, hopes to improve this. Sen. Jane Earll of Erie, the bill’s sponsor, said “The way we collect taxes now is antiquated, inefficient and results in a lack of withholding, lost revenue and revenue that ultimately does not get distributed to the municipalities where it belongs.”

If you’d like to read the bill, visit http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/billinfo/billinfo.cfm?syear=2007&sind=0&body=S&type=B&bn=1063.

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Web 2.0. You may have heard this buzzword a lot recently. It is a common term used to define the trend in the use of the web for information sharing and collaborating among web surfers. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Reader are the predominate Web 2. o applications, and the generation of “millenials” (20-somethings) and Gen-X’ers (30-somethings) are widely using these applications to keep connected.

The internet is now a platform, and companies must start using that platform for better business strategies. Jason Averbrook, CEO of Knowledge Infustion, recently pointed out these facts during a session at the International Association for Human Resources Information Management:

• One out of eight couples married in 2006 met online.
• MySpace is the 11th largest country in the world.
• There are 2.7 billion Google searches monthly.
• Daily sent text messages exceed the total population on Earth.

With software tools getting better and better, Web 2.0 technology will begin to seep into businesses. Concerns of proprietary information leaking and other security issues are the largest reason for companies not to embrace the technology, but an employee does not need Web 2.0 applications to violate a companies ethics policy. The medium is always there for an employee to break the rules, whether it’s via printing/mailing documents, emailing, or faxing. Web 2.0 is just another platform, and because this is a new way for employees to violate company policies it does not mean they will be more apt to.

What is your company doing to embrace these technologies? Do you currently allow your employees to access their Facebook or LinkedIn pages from work? Do you use a blog (like us at HRMG) to communicate to staff, clients, or others? There are no easy answers to Web 2.0, but the reality is that it is not going away, and HR will need to adapt to harness the power of this rising technology.

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On January 28, 2008, President Bush signed the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It expands the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) in two significant ways for families of injured military service members and those called to active duty.

First, effective immediately, the NDAA requires employers to provide up to 26-weeks of unpaid leave in a 12-month period to the spouse, son, daughter, parent or next-of-kin of a service member injured in the line of duty.

Second, the NDAA entitles the spouse, son, daughter or parent of a military service member on active duty, or on notice of an impending call to active duty, up to 12-weeks of unpaid leave in a 12 month period based on “any qualifying exigency”. However, this provision will not become effective until the Department of Labor (DOL) issues final regulation defining a “qualifying exigency”. The DOL’s website now “encourages” employers to provide such leave to eligible employees until it issues the final regulations.

In order to qualify for leave pursuant to the NDAA amendments, an employee still must comply with other provisions of the FMLA (be employed for at least a total of 12 months and worked at least 1250 hours in the previous 12-month period for an employer with 50 or more employees). Note, also, that if an employee requests FMLA leave to care for an injured service member and that employee has already taken FMLA leave in the past 12 months, the 26-week leave period will be reduced by the amount of leave previously taken.

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Exciting news for all Sage Abra users! Our Professional Services department is putting together a comprehensive library of Sage Abra reports, which you may purchase and download for your own use! Save yourself a boatload of time by accessing these professional reports and WOW your executive team!

To get started, we have a new website page under our Resources menu, where the first 15 of our 120 reports are available for you to review today. Visit http://www.hrmgsolutions.com/reports.asp to view the list and descriptions and understand the discounts applied to purchasing in quantity.

When you are ready to purchase, simply select the reports you want and hit Submit. You will receive an automatic confirmation notice, an HRMG Solutions invoice in the mail for purchasing the reports and a contact call from Jim Charles at HRMG Solutions to review the download process with you.

Please Note: If you wish the basic report was a little more tailored to your organization’s needs, changes can be made. Talk to Jim at jcharles@hrmgsolutions.com about customization details and costs.

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The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) released a revised Employment Eligibility Verification Form (I-9) this week. The form can be used immediately, but it is not officially effective until it is posted in the federal register.

To download the new form, visit the USCIS website.

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The Social Security Administration (SSA) announced on Wednesday, October 17, 2007, that the 2008 social security wage base will be $102,000, an increase of $4,500 from the 2007 wage base of $97,500. As in prior years, there is no limit to the wages subject to the Medicare tax; therefore, all covered wages are still subject to the 1.45% tax.

The FICA tax rate, which is the combined social security tax rate of 6.2% and the Medicare tax rate of 1.45%, remains at 7.65% for 2008. The maximum social security tax employees and employers will each pay in 2008 is $6,324.00. This is an increase of $279.00 from the 2007 maximum of $6,045.00.

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The Philadelphia Department of Revenue announced that effective January 1st, 2008, the city tax will decrease to 4.219% for residents and 3.7242% for non-residents.

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Last week Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell signed into law Senate Bill 218, which replaces the EMST with a modified Local Services Tax.  This change, which primarily benefits employees, adds instruction for withholding and sets income minimums for withholding.

For more information visit the NewPA site here.

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During our Abra User’s Group three weeks ago, we highlighted the changes occurring in Abra v7.6. For an update on the changes, visit our Forum section of the website for details.

We’re pleased to announce 1/2 day seminars designed to get you up to speed with all of the v7.6 changes, including an introduction to Crystal v10 (which will ship with Abra v7.6). These seminars are hands-on sessions in our Training Center, and you’ll experience all of the changes first hand, with the ability to ask your pertinent questions to our knowledgeable trainers.

Don’t miss out on this opportunity! To register, visit our Training section of the website for dates and times.

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