Audit, Compliance and Risk Blog

Persons over 40 years old form a protected class under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) of 1967. Although separate from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ADEA provides protections similar to those preventing discrimination based on sex, race and religion. It applies to each employer “engaged in commerce who has twenty or more employees for each working day in each of twenty or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year.” It is administered by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which promulgates regulations and guidelines similar to those for Title VII and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was enacted to protect the employment rights and opportunities of people with disabilities, and ensure their access to public services and accommodation. In September 2008, the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 repudiated several U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting ADA narrowly, and provided additional clarifications intended to ensure the broad availability of ADA’s protections. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) develops and applies employer standards, facilitates lawsuits by aggrieved employees, and can enforce ADA directly by filing its own lawsuits.

On April 16, 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court delivered another reminder that agreements must be drafted clearly and specifically if they are to deliver predictable outcomes – otherwise a court’s later efforts to sort through ambiguities may produce surprises. The case is U.S. Airways v. McCutchen. It arose under a medical benefits plan subject to the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA).

We’ve all just received a grim reminder how easily public celebrations can become public nightmares. Readers who may now be nervous about special events in their areas should know that law enforcement and security professionals have developed security protocols that formalize hazard assessment and management. One important template for such protocols was published in 2007 by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) – Planning And Managing Security For Major Special Events: Guidelines for Law Enforcement.

Many US federal laws provide explicit protections for whistleblowers – employees who report actual or potential violations of those laws to their employers or to the federal agencies that administer and enforce those laws. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has administered one such provision under its general worker protection authority for more than 40 years, and presently administers provisions under 22 distinct laws. The best known and most litigated of these non-OSHA laws probably is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOx) – Section 806 of that law protects whistleblowers who report activities that may violate anti-fraud provisions of the federal Securities Acts. The rest of this posting discusses this SOx provision; readers subject to additional laws should consider the implications for their activities.

By now, every reader should know that employers in the United States must verify would-be employees’ eligibility to work in the U.S.  The critical form for doing so is Form I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification), issued and administered by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) unit of the federal Department of Homeland Security.

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s extended beyond the ballot box to enter most U.S. workplaces. Beginning with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, federal (and follow-on states’) laws seek to ensure employees' rights to equal treatment, by prohibiting employer discrimination against employees because of any characteristics that historically have been the basis for discrimination (dubbed “protected classes”). Federally protected classes presently include the following:

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the passage of the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993. FMLA requires large employers to grant eligible employees time off to respond to a broad range of medical conditions that they or their immediate family members may suffer. Since 1993, the law has been amended and expanded a number of times, with the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) revising its regulations to incorporate and apply these changing requirements. For example, effective March 8, WHD has revised rules providing protections for National Guard and Reserve troops subject to deployments, and for airline flight crews.

Everyone has relationships in the workplace. Many relationships are purely professional, while some add personal elements, and one or more may even be very personal. Anti-discrimination laws may impose scrutiny on any relationship where at least one person is a manager or supervisor, or the owner of a small enterprise. In the U.S. these include laws (including Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, and comparable state laws), regulations and enforcement guidelines (from by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and state equivalents), and court cases applying these standards. In Canada these include comparable human rights and occupational health and safety regimes.

Do you ever discuss work with co-worker friends on Facebook or other social media sites? Or, if you’re an employer, do you worry about what your employees may post about work on their Facebook pages—even when they do so from home after hours?