Open Enrollment

Pixie

What are the rules (if any) on open enrollment? Is there minumum amount of time that an employer must have open enrollment prior to making benefit elections, changes, etc.?

Lola815

If I understand your question then I am going to say that there isn't any rules to how long open enrollment is but generally it is for 30 days. I usually tell employees that open enrollment is every January (or whatever month it is) and I try to let employees know at the beginning of the month that they have until the last day to fill out any forms to make their chagnes. There has been a few times where I have had open enrollment as short as a couple of days. I just always make sure that every employee has a chance to make changes if necessary.

marc

We allow the 30 days mentioned above, although I do not think it is a REGULATION. We also give a couple of heads up reminders during the two months ahead of time. We have found it takes some time for the importance of this annual election to sink in. Even at that, there is inevitably some that miss deadlines - so we set them a little bit ahead internally. That allows us to hound the slackers so we do not miss the real deadline.

HRQ

I haven't heard of regulations regarding this either.

I send out a notice in November that open enrollment meetings will be held in December, dates TBA. I then schedule one meeting at each location and send out a reminder at least a week in advance. In this reminder, I advise the employees to bring dependent info with them so it's handy for filling out forms.

I hold the meetings over the first two weeks in December and require forms be turned in by the 15th and encourage them to complete the forms AT the meeting whenever possible.

I then have the remaining two weeks of the month to go through them all, return incompletes for missing info, get them back and keyed in web enrollment and payroll by the 31st.

THIS year, we also expect to open two new schools during the month of December, in addition to all the other year-end "festivities" x;-) in payroll, in addition to open enrollment. HRQ might just be MIA from the Forum in December.