Flexible Spending Accounts

Gain a better understanding of the flexible spending accounts requirements and keep your company in compliance.

Employees and employers face enormous financial challenges as we navigate pandemic response, social unrest, and economic instability. Flexible spending accounts provided a simple tax savings program in previous years, but this simplicity has turned to complexity as employers weigh options and employees manage illness, layoffs, and furloughs. Employers can use their existing flexible spending accounts and can even design new vehicles to help employees manage these changes, but without a solid understanding of how these accounts work and the legal requirements, these accounts can become less of a benefit and more of a burden and liability. This topic will start with flexible spending account basics to ensure that the tax advantages that the accounts offer are maintained. It will also look at documentation requirements and some creative approaches to documentation that can ease administration. The material will then delve more deeply into using flexible spending accounts to their best advantage to address workplace changes and into the potential compliance traps that face employers that implement flexible spending accounts without understanding their compliance obligations. Human resource professionals will be armed with the tools and insight needed to manage and capitalize on flexible spending account benefits as part of solution oriented benefit design.