There always comes a time when your children must leave the nest, and the same thing happens with insurance benefits. So how do you go about removing your adult children from your account? Luckily, we have just the tool to help you do that!
This is a very helpful report that should be run often, at least on a week. It reports employees’ dependents who have an inactive status but also have benefits elected for the future plan year. This can happen when the dependent ages out of coverage, or has been removed from the employee’s benefits for whatever reason. Let’s run through the steps on how to find and fix these inactive dependents!
Running the Report:
Step 1: Go to the IMNS Dashboard (if you need a refresher on how to do this, check out our previous post on the IMNS Dashboard basics).
Step 2: Select the ‘Inactive Dependents With Active Elections’ box. Leave the division selection area alone if you want to know who out of everyone in the company is an inactive employee with future elections. Otherwise, you can limit this report to the desired specific division.
Step 3: Click ‘Run’ at the bottom of the page. This will give you a brief description of the report and the inactive employees with future elections. You will be able to see the employee name, employee status, and date of termination, among other information.
Fixing the Problem:
Step 1: Click the edit link by the employee’s name. This will take you to the employee’s record where you can terminate the benefits.
Step 2: From the Employee Menu, we will go to the Benefit Plan Enrollment page located under the Benefit Plan Information icon. Looking at the current election, we can see the dependent is listed. But when we go to the election page, we can see that the dependent is no longer listed. The reason why he doesn’t appear is because he is no longer eligible for this benefit. To save the benefit no longer including the dependent, we will need to use a Qualifying Event. Clicking save will prompt the pop up to appear.
Step 3: Remember, pop-ups are your friend! Click okay, and you will be brought to the qualifying event page.
Step 4: From the drop-down menu, select ‘change in dependent eligibility’. Enter the qualifying date – reach out to your broker if you are unsure of the correct date. The dependent will have coverage for the rest of the current month, but not after this event date.
Step 5a: Clicking the Save button will take you back to the benefit election page where this time around, when selecting coverage there is not a pop-up notification, but the effective date from our qualifying event automatically populates.
Step 5b: You won’t have to enter a Qualifying Event for each benefit so long as you continue to alter the elections without moving to another menu in the employee’s record. If you do leave to work on something else in the system and return later to finish modifying benefits, you’ll simply repeat the steps of adding a qualifying event.
Step 6: Click save and now the dependent has been removed from the benefit! Remember, the IMNS Dashboard is a notification system, it should prompt you to make the change or edits but like in our situation here, the change may not show up immediately.
We hope this helps solve any errors or potential discrepancies you might encounter, and as always, if you have any questions feel free to reach out to us! We are always happy to provide a dash of knowledge.