The experts at DirectAdvisors can help you design and coordinate a custom bona fide benefit plan solution that is right for your company, and that integrates with your existing benefit plans, insurance carriers, and brokers. Your plan can be designed in a way that relieves much of the burden and expense of government mandates.
DirectAdvisors was pleased to welcome two guests to our latest installment of our video podcast series. Mike Kiley (Consultant and Relationship Manager) and Karl Willman (Principal/Director of Midwest Small Defined Benefit Operations) of Nyhart joined Stacy Gregory, plan advisor from DirectAdvisors, in a discussion on Cash Balance Plans. Utilizing prevailing wage dollars in a Cash Balance Pension Plan offers various benefits for both employers and their employees. From tax benefits to employee retention, our panelists discussed how this type of plan works, and the advantages of implementing it alongside a defined contribution plan.
If you are a Public Works contractor and offer a bona fide prevailing wage plan, you are likely familiar with the concept of annualization. The U.S. Department of Labor prevailing wage resource book refers to annualization as: “The computational method that is used to calculate the hourly rate of benefit plan contributions that are creditable to a contractor’s prevailing wage fringe benefit obligation on covered projects.”
By paying prevailing wage fringe benefit dollars into a bona fide benefit plan, those dollars are not subjected to labor burden costs, such as FICA, unemployment taxes, workers compensation and general liability premiums.
We have been receiving several questions on how to comply with the amended prevailing wage bill that is now law. There are questions that still need to be clarified, however the purpose of the amendment is to have employers provide additional transparency of fringe supplements when workers are on public works jobs. Most of the questions we get relate to: “What do I have to provide to my employees?”
Annualization — If a contractor is doing public work and uses any of the fringe supplements to pay bona fide benefits to their employees, you need to know how to utilize these fringe supplements in a compliant way.