Background Screening Pitfalls: Ban the Box Laws, Assessments, and Compliance Traps

By Alden J. Bianchi, Esq. Edward A. Lenz, Esq. Employers maintaining benefit plans, including health insurance plans covered by the Affordable Care Act, must comply with certain notice and reporting rules established by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of Labor under the tax code and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act,… More ›

Last week, in a worker misclassification lawsuit involving the gig company Qwick, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu announced in a statement that Qwick had signed a “groundbreaking agreement” that would require the company to reclassify the workers as employees, pay them $1,850,000 in restitution and accrued sick leave, and pay the city a civil… More ›

The Form I-9 is a complicated two-page document that is accompanied by a 65-page handbook explaining how to complete it. There are many facets of I-9 completion that are unique to staffing firms. E-Verify is an Internet-based system maintained by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that allows businesses to verify the work eligibility of employees. The American Staffing Association offers this document to address the Form I-9 and E-Verify issues that staffing firms face most frequently. More ›

In Congress, Rep. Lloyd Smucker (PA-11) has introduced HR 6833, the Improve and Enhance the Work Opportunity Tax Credit Act. The bill, which would update the WOTC for the first time since 1996, has bipartisan support and has been referred to the House Ways and Means Committee. As currently drafted, the bill would increase the… More ›

The new, stricter worker classification rules published by the U.S. Department of Labor (as reported in Staffing Today Jan. 9, 2024) point up the importance of clients using staffing firms that operate as employers and that classify their temporary workers as W-2 employees. The new rules increase the risk to clients that use app-based job… More ›

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has announced a moratorium on processing of new claims for federal employee retention credit (ERC) tax credits while it intensifies its investigation of fraud and abuse under the program. In a news release issued Sept. 14, the IRS said the moratorium, which will last at least through the end of… More ›

A federal appeals court recently affirmed summary judgment in favor of a staffing firm, holding that two temporary workers failed to demonstrate the staffing firm knew about or was in the position to correct alleged harassment by a client’s employee. The temporary workers alleged they were separately mistreated by the same client employee—subjected to racial… More ›

by Paul Pincus, Esq., Ortoli Rosenstadt LLP Although every seller would like to sell its staffing firm “as is” and walk away from any associated liabilities, few deals get done that way. Instead, subject to negotiated limitations, most buyers expect the seller to be responsible, and make the buyer whole, for certain known and unknown… More ›

On Aug. 4, 2023, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed significant amendments to the Day and Temporary Labor Services Act into law. The new law took effect immediately, and the Illinois Department of Labor published emergency and proposed regulations to implement the law. The amended law imposes significant new obligations on staffing companies and their clients,… More ›

Changes in Congress and several state legislatures made it almost impossible to predict what legislative challenges the staffing industry might face in 2023. With the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in the rear-view mirror, it appeared that legislators would turn their attention to more traditional labor and employment issues, such as minimum wage increases, predictive… More ›