While the presence of the Coronavirus in the United States stretches into its fifth month, the pandemic continues to impact employers, their businesses, and their workers. Three of the latest developments are below.

As your business continues addressing these items, please remember that Bennett/Porter & Associates is here to continue supporting you, your employees, and your organization. We strive to keep you up-to-date on all the latest HR, payroll, and employer-related technology changes that impact your company. If you are not currently signed-up to receive our Blog posts, we encourage you to do so in order to avoid missing important updates such as these. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or technology needs you have.

More help brings more questions and new confusion. On March 27, 2020, Congress passed a second round of economic stimulus in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Some of the relief elements contained within this latest act include:

• Paycheck Protection Program Loans
• Additional Unemployment Benefits
• Student Loan Payments Suspension
• Funding for Hospitals, Airlines/Airports, and Food Assistance Programs
• Government Checks to Individuals
• Small Business Debt Relief
• Economic Injury Disaster Loans & Emergency Economic Injury Grants

Here is a closer look at some key aspects.

** This article was originally sent to our Bennett/Porter clients via email on 4/9/2020 **

There has been no shortage of information in the last couple of weeks regarding COVID-19 and the Federal mandate about paying employees who are sick with the virus, have been ordered to stay home to self-quarantine, or have a family member who is affected by the virus and who the employee must take care of. Despite all of the information, there are still many outstanding questions employers are encountering as they administer the processes around this mandate.

Given the continuing concern and uncertainty around COVID-19, we at Bennett/Porter have decided to postpone our Connections 2020 Conference. We believe that this is the right and responsible course of action to protect the health and well-being of our employees, vendors, event personnel, and, of course, our attendees. The conference will now be held on Thursday, October 22. All the current session tracks will still be available, and registration for the event will remain open at Early Bird pricing until Thursday, October 1. We will resume regular email updates with information about the conference as we get closer to that date.

Who is dreaming about the days of getting back to a normal version of crazy? You know, kids back in school, too many scheduled social gatherings, a day packed with back-to-back in-person meetings, watercooler talk with co-workers, sporting events to cheer at, too many toilet paper options at the grocery store, and bumper-to-bumper traffic in the morning and afternoon. Okay, maybe not so much the traffic.

These are definitely uncharted times that we are going through. It’s such a strange feeling to take that pause that keeps our family members, friends, co-workers, and even total strangers a little safer by staying distant from them. 

With all the constant, fast-breaking news pertaining to COVID-19, you may not have heard that yesterday, President Trump signed the “phase two” stimulus legislation. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) provides paid leave for certain workers, enhances unemployment insurance, and ensures free testing for infection by the Coronavirus. Unemployment eligibility requirements have been eased by waiving the work search requirements as well as the waiting week before benefits can be claimed. This measure also helps take care of small businesses (those with fewer than 500 employees) by providing reimbursement through tax credits for offering the qualified paid leaves.

Following his a very high overview of the paid leave benefits. For additional, detailed information, we encourage you to refer to the H.R. 6201 Act passed by Congress.

On December 19^th, Sage is scheduled to release an Interim Release Download (IRD) with year-end program updates for Accounts Payable and eFiling – as well as a Tax Table Update for 2020.

In 2017, we here at Bennett/Porter took a year off from hosting our annual Connections conference to focus on expanding our software and service offerings. This year we return with   and we invite you and your colleagues to join us.

It's been just over one week since Microsoft, Apple, and numerous software vendors released updates to patch their operating systems and applications with the goal of mitigating the impacts of Meltdown and Spectre. As those efforts were getting underway, we reported on what these threats are, things you might need to know, and what Bennett/Porter was focusing on to keep our data center secure. So where are we now? Here's a rundown.

Today we notified our customers about important security updates available for computers and servers using Intel processors; as well as for the VIPRE antivirus program. As you may be aware, the recently announced security vulnerabilities, known as Meltdown and Spectre, can be found in virtually all modern CPUs, and they represent possible information leakage based on unauthorized access to shared memory space. For those who haven't heard about this new type of network security threat, we thought it would be helpful to get the word out more broadly via this brief post so that people have at least the basic information about Meltdown and Spectre.