The federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires changes in workforce management and payroll procedures. The ACA redefines ‘full-time employee’ and changes how benefits eligibility is determined. These changes impact nearly every university department. Maintaining compliance requires collaboration between individual departments, Human Resources, and several other university offices.
Action Steps
Managers, supervisors, and payroll coordinators can help meet these requirements by taking the following actions.
- Review the ACA requirements in the documents below. Share these documents with other supervisors and managers as needed. These details refer to Norman programs.
- Update payroll reporting processes where needed (see summary below).
- Understand the additional cost of providing employee medical insurance to employees meeting the ACA definition of full-time employee (see summary below).
- After reading the related workforce management documents, contact Human Resources with questions.
Reporting
The ACA defines ‘full-time employee’ as any employee who averages 30 hours or more per week. The ACA requires that the university report hours for all employees and offer employee medical insurance to employees who meet the ACA definition of full-time employee. The ACA reporting requirements require new departmental record-keeping procedures for most employees, except full-time benefits eligible employees (.75-1.0 FTE).
Review the related Workforce Management documents below.
Insurance Eligibility & Cost
When an employee meets the ACA definition of full-time employee, Human Resources will automatically offer them employee medical insurance without further action from the department and regardless of the employee’s category in the OU payroll system. This may change the employee's payroll category. The university benefits fringe rate applied to this employee will change to cover the additional cost of providing medical insurance.