Tracking temporary workers for Affordable Healthcare Act presents challenges

The workforce is in the middle of a substantial shift. An increasing number of employers are hiring temporary workers through the use of staffing agencies to fill positions. These individuals sometimes work full-time for set contract periods or are members of a permanent staff of part-time workers. With the Affordable Healthcare Act going into effect, tracking these contingent employees can be a challenge.

As a staffing professional, you most likely are in charge of filling numerous positions with either variety of temporary workers. However, as the various parts of the Affordable Healthcare Act come into effect, you know that tracking those contingent employees correctly will be a challenging requirement, which means your job is going to become even more detail-oriented than before.

You’re going to have to track how long a worker has been with a company, whether they qualify as a full-time employee who requires medical benefits and if adding another full-time worker is going to change the status of a company. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that employers with at least 50 full-time workers must offer affordable coverage or pay a penalty.

Therefore, companies are turning toward outsourcing for specialty workers provided by another organization or increasing the number of temporary or contract employees that are on the payroll. As a staffing professional, you are most likely going to be put in charge of helping your clients decide the best course of action and how to go about managing the paperwork.

“The overwhelming majority of temporary help workers, even if they were working full-time on a weekly basis for a number of months, wouldn’t be covered because of that 12-month look-back period,” Susan N. Houseman, an economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, told the news source. She added that the rules “were written in a very favorable way for the temporary help industry.”

That boost in the temp agency is going to result in additional work for staffing workers. You’re going to have to track more workers with recruiting software that can handle the sheer volume and complexity of the workforce you are dealing with and advise clients on what’s best.

“We expect that clients that have those kinds of workers and who are daunted by the complexity of the Affordable Care Act will look to staffing firms to help them manage those kinds of workers,” said Edward A. Lenz, senior counsel for the American Staffing Association.

0 replies

Leave a Reply

Want to join the discussion?
Feel free to contribute!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *