HR Pieces - Issue No. 5
Performing an Audit of Your I-9 Compliance

September 23rd is nearly upon us and for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, you better start doing your research. When the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was signed into effect last March, there were several major milestone dates identified. One of which is 9/23/10. Health insurance coverage, as we know it, begins a tremendous transformation for those of you who have policy renewals on, or after that date. Just a few of the considerations you should be aware of are:


* Preventative Medical Care - Insurers will be required to cover charges for common preventative care services without charging co-pays. Some of the most common of which are immunizations and mammogram.

* Adult Child Coverage - Dependants up to age 26 can receive "dependant coverage" with all individual and group policies.

* Pre-Existing Conditions - Insurers can no longer exclude children with pre-existing conditions from insurance coverage.

* Lifetime Limits - Limits on how much your insurance coverage pays out to cover claims are no longer allowed.

As you can imagine, with a Senate Bill that was 2,562 pages long, there are a lot more issues to discuss. Reporting changes - changes to HSA, FSA, HRA, and MSA rules - multiple tax & tax credit considerations. The overall financial impact to employers has been estimated by some to be . . . Read more in the September issue of HR Pieces Newsletter at http://www.ueven.com/company/hr-pieces.aspx

http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs071/1102956896861/archive/1103474330220.html

News Release


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Generally my clients are concerned about the price. As a consultant I am continually asked about the price tag of a project. How can this same thing be done cheaper? Most of my clients get a second or third bid on a project the first time I work with them. Most of the time, my bids are slightly higher than average but well under the highest. The best thing to do when this happens is to take a look at why. Why is one bid more than another? Does one vendor do something the other does not? Do they both meet the job requirements? Let’s say that on paper all the outcomes are the same, why is one bid more than another?

In the IT world in particular there is not an overall governing body to state that a network will have these things done this way. Consultants are free to piece together technologies any way they see fit, even if they weren’t designed to work that way even if there is a better way. Most of the time, the clients will not have any idea that their project is going to cost significantly more to maintain than the original price tag, especially if it is piecemealed together in such a manner.

Let’s take a simple example, you have three machines that you need to network together to run your company. I can meet the contract line buy selling Vista Home Basic edition for $99(MSRP). I know that by the end of the year you are going to have 5 employees and start down the path to a domain. This does not change the contract line, but it changes the bid price for someone who wants your business long term. To meet not just your immediate needs but your goal over the next year, those three machines should have Vista business with a $199(MSRP). The bid mentioned nothing about an office suite. Their MSRP is from $149.95 to $679.95 depending on the version. Let’s give the other bidder some credit that they assumed you need an Office suite, and they get the $150 version. I know you need to make PowerPoint slides and will be using an Access database, therefore you will need the $500 version.

I have used basic knowledge of your company to change my bid in a way I know you will need. These items have increased my bid right there alone by $1350 while not changing the “on paper” outcome at all. You still have three machines that are networked together to run your company on both bids.

My bid has reduced your probabilities of needing to upgrade in the next year. The other company has ensured you will. Generally companies will call the last person they worked with, unless it was a very unpleasant experience, to do their next job. Well guess what, there is $1350 and many billable hours for that company, plus your time away from the machine during upgrades. This happens so many times, and is totally legal to boot.

Now is where the situation starts to go downhill. It is a year down the road when you are ready to upgrade to a domain. The other company bids it cheap again, does some things that they know are the wrong way, but the cheapest way. It causes more problems that they have to fix. The company says an upgrade will fix it. The cycle goes on and on.

I was asked to look at a company’s network for them. They had a $10,000 SBS server, three machines that were upward of $2000, and 2 nice laptops. They were spending almost $500 a month in service charges to keep it all running. The company consisted of two users, whose main job on their machines was to get their email.

They had been stuck in this cycle for a few years. They started with the cheapest bid they could find. They cycled through a few systems, set ups, configurations. Always their bids came back with their current company being the cheapest. They were continually convinced that upgrades were the only way out and their current service was the cheapest way to fix things. They had no idea that their choice on cheap solutions was causing the problems that lead to the cycle of continual stepping stone upgrades. A cycle never ending until they were upgraded way past any reasonable installation.

I have seen it time and time again, in many different industries. When you bought it the computer was “super fast”. Then it happens, slowly, over the years, It begins to run slower. We have all seen this happen. I would like to take a minute to talk about situations when a certain computer is just not right for a user. I would like to highlight one example; out of dozens that I can recall over the last few years, where you know you need to upgrade but you just cannot justify the expense of new hardware right now.


I visit this particular client a few times a month. I know most of the people that work there and their personalities. I noticed a particular person sitting at their computer, which was not going at full speed. I decided to take a few minutes and see if something was bothering her. When I asked if something was wrong she of course said “No.” I pressed a little and asked her more directly why she was working so half heartedly. Her reply shocked me even more, “I cannot work any faster; this computer cannot keep up as it is”. Laughing I decided to take a look at what was going on.

It was an older machine for sure, 512kb of memory in a XP machine that has had its software upgraded many times. It is not so old that it is useless. In fact it is one of the better hardware configurations at this office. I took a look at what she was working with. She had 5 or so Excel documents open, that where hundreds of lines each, a few rich text documents open, outlook, and a couple of file folders. It did not take long to make the leap that she was just doing more at once than this machine could handle. It was taking a good 10 seconds to switch between documents. Since her job was basically to move, compare and review the information between each of the documents, closing some of them was just not an option.

Okay, now I have identified a problem. A client has an employee who is not as productive as she can be because her computer hardware is inadequate for her needs. Now what do we do about it? How do I convince the company that now is the time to spend money on new hardware? The economy is currently “tight”, to put it nicely. I am sure they are dealing with their own issues due to that.

I decided to take the soft approach. I identified the exact problem, took it to the company point of contact and decision maker, where I added that some of the other machines in the office would benefit from having their systems reinstalled as well. I explained to the point of contact that the years of changes to their network environment have taken a toll on their PCs.

I decided to price out a machine that would be able to keep up with the employee’s. The price of PC is constantly dropping, so finding a machine in today’s market that can keep up with the employee’s was not hard. As it turns out I concluded that an adequate model would cost under $700.00, which included being energy star and having a flat screen monitor.

I pointed out that one of their users, in my estimation, was sitting there for at least an hour a day waiting on her machine. Armed with that information and the $700 price tag, I left the contacts to draw their own conclusions. They called me within a week with an order for 4 new PC’s.

Here was their conclusion, let’s take an arbitrary number of $14 per hour (easy math is good), that is $70 per week that the company is paying a person to sit there. With $700 for a new machine, the company can get back that time at $70 per week, which comes out to 10 weeks for the return on their investment. That is how upgrading hardware can save you money.