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The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, technically named “To provide for reconciliation pursuant to title II of H. Con. Res. 14,” was signed by the president on July 4. Clocking in at 870 pages, it’s short for a reconciliation bill, but still packs a punch for individuals and payroll departments.

We offer employees a pay advance of up to 60 hours or PTO if they want to use paid time off before having earned it. What happens if they quit or are terminated before earning that advance payment back? Can we simply deduct the amount from their last check without their specific consent?

The time to conduct a pay-equity audit is before employees file a suit. Conducted proactively, the audits can prevent thousands or even millions of dollars in damages and legal fees.

Increasingly, U.S. Supreme Court decisions turn on the exact language Congress chose to use when writing laws. The justices often rely on the ordinary meaning of the words contained in legislation.

We have remote workers in our state and in other states. How do we handle expense reimbursement for remote workers? Does it depend on whether the employee chooses remote work or we mandate it?

The Supreme Court agreed with a highly compensated employee who argued that because he was paid a daily rate, he wasn’t being paid on a salary basis. Now a federal appeals court has applied that logic to another employer.

An employee took a day of paid-time-off leave, but her supervisor called and texted several times to ask work-related questions. Does that time still count against her PTO bank, or should some of it be paid? Does it make a difference if they are an hourly employee or on salary?

Willful violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act carry much harsher, more costly penalties than inadvertent violations. Employers can avoid being labelled a willful violator by showing they made a good-faith effort to comply with the law.

The Department of Labor will no longer enforce its 2024 independent contractor rule, issued during the Biden administration, which favored classifying workers as employees. Instead, it will rewind the classification clock, emphasizing an old standard that makes it much easier to consider workers to be contractors.

If you have employees who work remotely at least some of the time, you know how difficult it is to track exactly what they are doing and when they’re doing it. That can be bad news if those employees are nonexempt. They must be paid for all work they perform—whether you knew they were working or not.