(Published January 26, 2009)
Everyone makes mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes can have long-lasting effects. Let me tell you about two that were discovered last week. One mistake was made by an employee, the other by our Benefits team; one we did something about, one we did not.
I took the call from the employee. He started out by explaining that he had taken the day to catch up on some old e-mails and had discovered our announcement that the FSA (flexible spending account) amounts could not roll over from year to year. He very pleasantly asked if it was too late to open an FSA account for 2009.
Let me give you some background. We were pretty flexible about open enrollment (OE) this year. It ran from November 10 through November 21. We sent out notices to people letting them know what changes had been made. If we saw employees who had had an FSA account last year and did not sign up for one this year, we sent them a reminder. If they had even a remotely acceptable reason, we allowed employees to enroll after the final date. We accepted enrollments all the way till Christmas, and even a few the last week of the year.
But we drew the line at January 1. We were now into the new plan year. Qualifying events only, we decided. We thought we'd been more than reasonable in extending the OE enrollments as long as we did. We did agree that we'd consider situations where the employee had a valid reason for the delay — being outside the country from before November 10 until after December 31 was the one we had in mind. We knew there were a few employees with that issue.
The employee who called me was not one of them, and we didn't consider not reading his e-mails to be a good reason. Even when he stopped being pleasant and starting arguing about how this was going to affect his taxes, we said no. We simply couldn't justify any further exceptions.
We did make an exception, though, for a lady who called later in the week. She had dropped off her health insurance enrollment forms personally at our office, she said. She knew the date she had done it and the approximate time. Additionally, her name was somewhat familiar to me and to the Benefits Manager, although neither of us could remember why. She wondered when she would start seeing a deduction for her health insurance out of her paycheck.
There was no reason on earth why she shouldn't be seeing deductions already. We looked her up and didn't see her enrollment in her record. Since she knew so definitely when she had dropped off her forms, we did a search to see if they'd gotten into the wrong pile, or if they were in someone's "call back" folder. We couldn't find a trace of them.
This was clearly our error, and we made it right for the employee. We could hardly hold her responsible for our mistake. She will have to make up the back deductions, but we're not going to force her to go without insurance for a year because we mislaid her forms.
When it comes to employees' error, there does come a time when you simply have to draw the line and say, "No more." When it's your own error, though, it's not fair to hold the employee responsible. You don't have to violate your policies, or the law, when an employee is careless, but when you mess up, you fix it.
Have an error-free week!
Catherine Bannon is an HR consultant in Marshfield, MA (catherine.bannon@gmail.com). Bannon worked for 10 years in HR management before starting her consulting practice.
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