Practices: Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation (Healthcare)

Hospital careers are demanding. Staff members care for patients who are scared and vulnerable, they work long and often nontraditional schedules, and frequently must take advanced training and education courses. Unless your hospital combines effective compensation strategies with competitive retirement, health, disability and other employee benefit plans, you may not be able to hire and retain the skilled help you need. Yet this is a greater challenge than ever when your revenues are limited by administered prices for Medicare, Medicaid, and other patients.

Healthcare Focus

Ungaretti & Harris works in partnership with health care providers to provide the highest level of benefits and compensation counsel with built-in economic efficiency and customized delivery of legal services. Given our large number of hospital system, nursing home and other healthcare clients, nearly half of our benefits counsel is focused on provider organizations. That means you get benefits and compensation advice tailored to your financial operational needs by lawyers who understand competitive industry conditions.

Full Service

You also get the advantage of one of the largest benefits practices for any mid-sized Chicago law firm, with more than a half-dozen full-time ERISA lawyers who can handle all aspects of benefits counsel. You’ll work with lawyers who all have a minimum of 10 years, and often more than 20 years, in the benefits field. The advice that you receive will encompass the financial, tax, administrative and fiduciary responsibility issues that are central to effective compensation and benefit programs, and their integration with your specific employment policies and practices.

Plan Compliance

Healthcare providers that are subject to the Internal Revenue Service’s National Audit Initiative directed at Section 403(b) retirement programs – as well as 401(k) plan opportunities that have been extended to tax-exempt entities – can confidently turn to Ungaretti & Harris for full compliance guidance. From effective plan structure and design to preventive plan reviews that identify and correct problems before they show up in an IRS audit, you will receive all the help you need to avoid compliance problems. That also includes help in properly classifying and determining benefit coverage for part-time employees, leased employees, shared employees and independent contractors. Your plans are properly organized to ensure that all important documents, government filings and compliance test results are readily available in case of an IRS or Department of Labor audit.

Plan Combinations

Healthcare provider mergers and network formation often involve substantial benefit issues, particularly when the parties to the transaction are both for-profit and non-profit entities. In any plan combination you get the help you need to identify and resolve benefit plan liability issues, properly restructure benefit plan coverage, preserve preferential benefits for physicians, and carefully administer ERISA fiduciary obligations. When network clients consolidate or coordinate the multiple benefits plans of affiliated entities, they rely on us to ensure that all necessary distinctions are made between taxable and tax-exempt operations.

ERISA Advice

The requirements of the Employee Retirement and Income Security Act (ERISA) are complex and sometimes contradictory. A clear definition of your responsibilities as a fiduciary is essential, and our extensive ERISA knowledge gives you the assurance that is the foundation of an aggressive defense. Our Fiduciary Risk Assessment package can be tailored to healthcare providers, explaining what the law expects of you and helping you understand investment obligations. Once you know where you stand, you can secure any additional liability insurance that you need, and institute processes to keep better tabs on outside service providers and vendors. The goal is simple – avoid the problems that can lead to lawsuits.

Compensation Design

Executive compensation arrangements are at the heart of much benefits planning, and we can advise you on all aspects of equity and deferred compensation planning for senior hospital administrators and medical staff. You get the kind of in-depth understanding of tax, accounting, disclosure and securities considerations necessary to implement effective equity compensation arrangements, including such specialized applications as SERPs and split-dollar life insurance arrangements. Clients also regularly ask us to design deferred compensation plans, incentive compensation plans, supplemental executive retirement plans, excess benefit plans, rabbi trusts and other funding arrangements.

Competitive Advantage

Health insurance, life insurance and pension plans represent a major portion of any healthcare provider’s personnel expense. Although all employers face these issues, healthcare organizations operate in a cost and regulatory environment that makes focused advice a must. Ungaretti & Harris can help your organization properly construct benefit and compensation plans so that you reap their full operational, financial and competitive advantages.