Paid
Sick Days May be Mandated in
California – Don’t
Wait!

What Must
You Give
Employees
Leaving Your
Company?

Employees
who are separating employment in California must
receive specific documents on their way out the
door. Make sure yours are up to
date.

At minimum, an employee leaving
voluntarily or involuntarily must
receive:

• A
  Notice of Change in
  Employment Relationship
  form. This is usually for the employee to take to the
  Employment Development Department (EDD) to begin the
  unemployment insurance process. Click here
  for a sample Change
  in Relationship form.
• A
  “For Your
  Benefits” brochure
  published by the CA EDD outlining an employee’s rights
  to several state benefit programs. The most recent
  publication (DE2320) is dated November 2006. You
  may order these from our office or download
  the lengthy EDD DE form
  2320 here.
• The
  California
  Health Insurance Premium
  Payment (HIPP) Program also
  requires that employers give separating employees
  notice of their rights under the HIPP laws for
  assistance in paying medical premiums. You may
  download a sample HIPP
  Notice here.

All
of the above forms and more are available to our clients
at our website library. Contact us for the
password.

• An
  employee or his/her dependents losing group
  health coverage may be eligible for COBRA continuation
  of coverage and must receive a COBRA
  Continuation Coverage Election Notice
  outlining all the rights
  under this extensive law. This Notice does not
  have to be delivered to the employee on the final work
  day. However, timing and proof of delivery are
  very important under this law. The employer must
  notify the plan administrator within 30 days of the
  employee’s loss of coverage. The plan administrator
  must send to the employee (and covered dependents) the
  Notice within 14 days. COBRA Notices will vary.
  We suggest you contact your insurance carrier first,
  and we can certainly advise as
  well.

  Employers with 20 or fewer
  employees will be covered by Cal-COBRA and will have
  these notification services completed by the
  insurance carrier. Larger employers will have to
  administer this notification process internally or
  hire a third party to do so. Penalties for
  delaying this Notice are significant, ranging from
  $100/day for each day of non-compliance to $500,000 or
  10% of the health plan costs (whichever is less) for
  major violations.

Employees
who also have profit sharing, retirement funds, 401k,
etc. should also receive notice of the options of the
disbursement of these funds, although this does not have
to be done by the last day of work. Each
plan should have a notice period set out in the
plan documents.

By the way, an employee
whose employment is separated may request a W-2 prior to
the normal January cycle. If requested, the
W-2 must be sent for all wages paid during the
current calendar year. The form must be sent
within 30 days of the request or, if later, within 30
days of your last payment of wages to the
employee.