Inactive employees with future elections would be cool if it was part of a ‘Back to the Future’ scenario. Unfortunately, Marty McFly probably doesn’t show up on your IMNS dashboard report.
This is a very helpful report that should be run often, at least on a weekly basis. It reports employees who have a terminated or inactive status but also have benefits currently in force or continue to a future date. This can happen when we change an employee’s status to “Terminated”, “COBRA”, “Deceased”, etc. and forget to terminate benefits. Let’s run through how to find and fix these inactive employees!
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 Employees With Future 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’s administration menu, go to the ‘Terminate Plan Elections’ page by clicking on the Benefit Plan Information icon.
Step 3a: You will need to terminate the active elections by entering in the appropriate termination date and clicking ‘Save.’ These could be dates that the effective and termination dates are showing in the future. What you need to do in that case is terminate both elections one day prior to their taking effect.
Step 3b: If the benefits are within the same plan year, you would enter the last date the benefit should be active.
Step 4: Just to verify, you can revisit the benefits elections page and see the employee does not have any benefits effective for the new plan year.
Bonus Tips:
- Before you begin this type of discrepancy work, it’s a good idea to research the employee for their termination date, benefit termination date, and maybe even their contract expiration date so that you can have that information ready when dealing with these types of discrepancies.
- Changing an employee from Active to FMLA status typically does not require a termination of benefits, so those employees should not appear in this report. For any other status change, you should terminate the employee’s elections first, and then change their status.
- As with any change, remember to make that journal entry!
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.