The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), was signed into law on February 17, 2009, by President Obama. The ARRA creates a nine-month, government-funded subsidy for the COBRA continuation premiums for employees who lose health care coverage as a result of an involuntary termination of employment between September 1, 2008 and December 31, 2009.

The subsidy is a 65% reduction in the amount of the premium an eligible individual is required to pay ...

On January 1, 2009, Massachusetts became the 12^th state to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana. In November, voters passed a referendum which made possession of less than an ounce of marijuana a civil offense with a $100 fine. Anyone under the age of 18 caught with an ounce or less of marijuana will need to complete a drug awareness course or face a $1000 fine.

Norm Bour, co-host of ‘The Real Estate and Finance Show,’ said, “Employers are sometimes reluctant to hire people with bad credit because their credit could signal irresponsibility or over-indebtedness that could interfere with their ability to do the job.”< ...

Recent statistics posted by Vault.com show that in 2008, 44% of employers admitted to looking up potential hires on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or other social networking web sites (http://www.vault.com/surveys/social-networking/). Furthermore, 82% of employers stated that viewing something they perceive as negative on a social networking site profile would affect their decision to hire a job candidate. With ever the increasing popularity of social networking sites (Facebook and LinkedIn both have more than 20 million registered users), this is going to become a more important issue.

Although employers may find this process advantageous the pros and cons are worth considering before making any final decisions.

On the “Pro” side you have reduction of errors, cost savings, increased organization and interfacing with E-Verify.  On the “Con” side there are set-up costs and I-9 audits may be made easier for the government.

The Pros

Since September 11, 2001, an increasing number of industries have begun requiring FBI fingerprint background checks.  These checks are no longer relegated to just the financial, military and government industries.  Over the last couple of years states like Pennsylvania and Texas (http://www.dfps.state.tx.us/Child_Care/Information_for_Child_Care_Professionals/fingerprint.asp) have begun to require FBI checks for those employees who work in the childcare (teachers, day care providers, etc) or eldercare fields.  Recently, North Dakota legislators t ...

Hackers strike again!  On Tuesday, Heartland Payment Systems disclosed that in late 2008, intruders managed to hack into the computers it uses to process 100 million payment card transactions per month (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/hacking/2009-01-20-heartland-credit-card-security-breach_N.htm).

The data-theft program used was so sophistica ...