Do you have employees that you have paid during the COVID-19 outbreak even though they weren’t working? If so, you should soon be able to exclude this payroll from your workers compensation premium. This new rule is being filed by the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) the week of April 20, 2020 and will have to be approved by each state. However, most states follow NCCI rating and statistical guidance. You can see a map of states that follow NCCI here. It’s important to note that if approved, this rule would be retroactive to the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Another change being considered by NCCI would allow employees whose job activities changed during the pandemic to be reclassified. This could be beneficial if you had a non-clerical employee who has been doing clerical work from home during the pandemic, as that portion of their payroll could potentially be reclassified as clerical.
The rules for how both of these changes would apply and how they would be tracked haven’t yet been announced, but we would recommend that you keep good records about what jobs employees were doing and when they were doing it so that you can take advantage of any changes. For now that might require a simple spreadsheet.
Jowers-Sklar Insurance will be monitoring these changes so we can share with clients when the final rules are in place.
For more information about these pending changes, you can see question #3 and #4 on the NCCI COVID-19 FAQ Page.