A recent poll conducted by Harris Interactive asked employees one very loaded question; who is to blame for your financial problems? For the most part, employees named the usual suspects, Congress, Wall Street, the President and one big surprise, their employer.

Statistics from the poll revealed that 3 in 10 employees felt their employer was to blame for their financial problems. This is roughly the same number of people who blamed themselves for poorly managing their finances.

On top of this, employees are more likely to blame their employers than their families for wasteful spending and failure to save. So when an employee’s spouse buys a high definition flat screen TV he knows they can’t afford you’re getting the blame for the financia ...

Effective for all plan years beginning on or after February 4, 2010, employers have a new notice requirement to adhere to. This requirement comes as a result of the “Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009” (CHIPRA), which President Obama signed into law February 4, 2009.

CHIPRA allows individuals who may be eligible for premium assistance under a state Medicaid program or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to enroll in the group health plan during a special enrollment period (i.e. outside of their annual open enrollment).

Pursuant to the CHIPRA Act, employers must notify employees of their CHIPRA enrollment rights if their state of residence provides premium assistance. According to Department of Labor, E ...

As the Internet evolves and identity theft criminals get more and more tech-savvy, it isn’t any wonder the number of identity theft crimes has skyrocketed over the past few years.

To keep your personal information safe online, you’ll need to first know the most common methods thieves use to collect your information. That way, you can figure out what actions you’ll need to take to stop them.

These are:

1. Phishing: Phishing happens when a thief sends out an email ...

Identity thieves can steal personal information from you at work, in public, online or even from your home (a place that so many of us think is a safe haven). The first step to protecting your information in all these places is knowing where the thieves will go to get their hands on it.

Let’s start off by looking at the workplace.

Personal information in any given workplace is vulnerable to the prying eyes and hands of permanent staff, temporary and contract workers or even the after-hours custodial staff that comes in and cleans the building every night.

If there’s an identity thief lurking in and around your work ...

If you’re familiar with how group long term disability (LTD) insurance works you know premiums are paid so that when employees become disabled, they get 60% of their monthly income as a benefit. In cases where the employer pays their employees’ monthly LTD premiums, the benefits employees get when they become disabled are subject to tax.

There are a few ways employees can avoid paying taxes on their LTD benefits and one of these is paying taxes on employer contributions to their premiums. How do employees do this?

First they find out how much their employer contributes to their LTD insurance premiums for the year. This information is very easy to find on a Total Compensation Statement so if you provide this to employees ...

As discussed in the previous blog post, your passwords are often your only barrier protecting personal information from the prying eyes of identity thieves. So, it goes without saying that they should be kept both strong and secret.

We’ve gone over how to make your passwords strong, here are a 4 steps that you should take to make sure they’re kept secret:

1. Don’t write your passwords down: The safest place to store your passwords is clearly your own mind, which is why they should be relatively easy for you to remember. However, if you’re someone with a lot of different passwords to different accounts, you might nee ...

As an employer, when asked what the five costliest health conditions are what do you think would top your list, cancer and heart disease, correct? It depends on what factors you look at to determine cost.

The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM) recently published a study revealing that employers who focus solely on employees’ direct medical and pharmacy costs in creating cost-containment strategies are missing a major component of the picture. These findings were based on data from over 51,000 employees and 1.13 million medical and pharmacy claims.

Where employers could be missing the point:

Employers wh ...

If you lived during the Middle Ages and had a castle, you’d want to prevent invaders from breaking in, destroying your property, kidnapping your loved ones, etc. So what would you do? Build a moat, correct?

Now most, if not all of you, would pull out all the stops to create the deepest, most crocodile-filled moat imaginable. After all, it would be your only barrier for keeping invaders out. When creating passwords for your personal information you should use this exact same logic.

That’s because just like a moat is the only barrier keeping invaders out of a castle, your passwords are often your only barrier standing between personal information and identity thieves.

Just last Friday, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley released a report pinpointing the main driver of the Commonwealth’s rapidly spiraling health care costs—the market clout of highest paid providers. Simply stated, Massachusetts insurance companies are paying certain doctors and hospitals significantly more than others for the same patient care.

Coakley’s year-long investigation leading up to this report revealed that a small group of roughly 10 hospitals statewide commanded anywhere from 10 to 100 percent higher payments than their competitors for similar work.

The study also found no evidence that this higher pay was due to better quality of patient care or treatment of more complex cases. In fact, the study revealed that:& ...

Identity theft is a huge and costly problem. In fact, it has recently surpassed drug trafficking as the number one crime in the nation and claims one new victim every 3 seconds.

Identity theft can happen to anyone and its results are devastating: stolen funds, a tarnished credit rating and obligations to pay off debt that isn’t even your own.

To keep from becoming victims of identity theft, all individuals should:

• Keep sensitive personal information under wraps