Outsourcing Administration

Outsourcing benefit administration is a less drastic option than leasing your employees. Outsourcing allows you to keep your workers as employees of your business but takes away most of the administrative burden of having to do the paperwork and jump through the legal hoops of administering the benefit plans.

There are two essential steps in finding and keeping a good administrator:

• using good selection criteria in choosing an administrator
• measuring performance to make sure the administrator is working out

In order to know how to choose and monitor a benefits administrator, you have to know a little something about the laws that affect benefits. The two main ones that you should concern yourself with are the:

• Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA)
• Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA)

Despite their weird names, these two laws are extremely important and affect all or most benefits that you could offer. They also have complex administrative requirements, which is why you should probably leave the administrative stuff to an outside party — it can be money well spent.