Don’t Miss These Important Year-End Essentials
Editor’s Note – Important: On December 23, 2024, a federal appeals court again considered this issue and reversed the previous ruling. In light of the December 23, 2024, decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the preliminary injunction against the Corporate Transparency Act’s (CTA) beneficial ownership information (BOI) reporting requirements has been reversed, and the reporting requirement is once again in effect. While the ruling re-establishes reporting obligations for most companies, the Department of the Treasury has extended key deadlines to accommodate businesses affected during the injunction period. Reporting companies now have until January 13, 2025, to file their initial BOI reports. Based on this decision, the ICS is now encouraging our members with corporations and LLCs to complete the filing. You can find more information here.
As the year comes to a close, we want to remind you of essential tasks to review before year-end. Check out the video for all the details!
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Referenced Links:
- Employee Sexual Harassment Prevention Training PDF
- Employee Sexual Harassment Prevention Training Resources
- FinCEN BOI: A Texas court issued a Preliminary Injunction (Texas Top Cop Shop, Inc. vs. Garland) stating that the BOI reporting requirement cannot “be enforced, and reporting companies need not comply with the CTA’s January 1, 2025, BOI reporting deadline pending further order of the Court.” As a result, you are no longer required to complete the BOI report to FinCEN at this time.
- Paid Leave Requirement Information
Transcript:
We hope you’re having a great week. We’re coming up to the end of the year, and there are several things we want to highlight to make sure that you don’t miss. We’ll drop some links down below for each one of these. But the first is this, don’t forget that every single year, all of your employees have to undergo employee sexual harassment prevention training. It’s not a problem because the Illinois Department of Human Rights actually has that training available at no cost to you. Again, we’ll put that link down below, but make sure all of your employees have completed the employee sexual harassment prevention training. That is important.
Another key thing that we want to highlight is this, and that’s the FinCen Beneficial Ownership Information reporting requirements that we previously told you about. The courts have preliminarily enjoined that. So right now that is not going to be a requirement at this stage until they make a final ruling, but in their preliminary injunction, they indicated that they believe that there was sufficient evidence to indicate that it was going to be ruled as unconstitutional. But when that ultimately happens, we’ll definitely inform our members. As of this stage, the reporting requirement is not a requirement right now for 2024.
Other things that you want to make sure that you watch out for. You want to make sure that you watch and review your employee compensation. Don’t forget 2025 January 1, the minimum wage in Illinois goes up to $15 an hour, so make sure that all of your staff compensation meets that minimum wage requirement. Lastly, we want to remind you of this, because 2024 is the first year for the paid time off, or the Illinois-required paid leave, we want to make sure that you have the appropriate setup for carry-forward hours. So if you are not pre-loading all of the hours for your employees to be able to take their full 40 hours at the beginning of the year if they are accruing it over time in the year, then they also have the ability, the law mandates that they are able then to carry forward those hours into the new year, but it does also say that you’re never required to allow them to take more than 40 hours unless your current policy does indicate that, or your policy indicates that they can, you know, exceed the state minimum requirements for paid leave.
So we just want to touch base on that. Don’t forget employee sexual harassment prevention training, the new minimum wage at the beginning of the year, and the PTO requirements for carry forward. You want to make sure that all of that’s taken care of. Also, you want to make sure if you’re going to change your participation status with Medicare. Get that done before the end of the year. Make sure you go through exclusion checks with all of your employees. Although OIG really recommends that to be done more often. We remind our doctors every single year that that you really want to get that done you don’t want to set that aside. Make sure that all of your posters are updated as well. Hopefully, this information catches you up on a lot of the happenings at the end of the year, and we’ll catch you next year.
