Insights
Insights
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- Effective May 26, 2015, certain H-4 dependent spouses of H-1B nonimmigrants will become eligible for their own employment eligibility.
- Labor and Employment Alert: Department of Labor Finalizes Rule on Same-Sex Spouses for FMLA CoverageThe federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides eligible employees of covered employers with unpaid, job-protected leave for specified family, medical, and military family reasons. On February 25, 2015, the Department of Labor (DOL) issued a Final Rule that revises the FMLA’s regulatory definition of “spouse.”
- As the 131st Ohio General Assembly continues to get underway, Senate Democrats recently introduced three bills regulating employers’ use of consumer credit reports, criminal histories and social media accounts.
- Paige Kohn, an associate in the Vorys Columbus office, authored an article for Columbus C.E.O. titled “How Businesses Can Avoid Legal Risks of Utilizing Social Media.” The story highlighted the pros and cons of the use of social media in the workplace.
- Monica Oathout, a partner in the Vorys Houston office and a member of the labor and employment group authored an article titled “Religious Discrimination and Same Sex Marriage.”
- Under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (NJLAD), an employer can be liable for hostile work environment harassment in two ways. First, an employee can assert a cause of action directly against the employer for negligently or recklessly causing the hostile environment. Second, the employer can be vicariously liable for the acts of its supervisors. The New Jersey Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Aguas v. State, 2015 N.J. LEXIS 131 (2015), significantly impacts the state’s employers when it comes to defending against that second theory of sexual harassment and reinforces the importance of effective anti-harassment procedures.
- Founded in 2007, Glassdoor.com is an online “career community” with a database consisting of several million company reviews, CEO ratings, salary reports, job interview reports and more. But as both the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal phrased things – in articles published nearly three years apart – Glassdoor is a website where employees can “anonymously dish” on their companies and bosses.
- The Ohio Department of Taxation is expected to begin auditing businesses within the oil and gas industry for sales and use tax compliance (i.e., purchase audits).
- The Ohio Department of Taxation has announced its renewed effort to audit Ohio direct pay permit holders for sales and use tax compliance (i.e., purchase audits).
- In a significant victory for the oil and gas industry, on February 17, 2015, the Supreme Court of Ohio, in State ex rel. Morrison v. Beck Energy Corp., affirmed the State of Ohio’s “sole and exclusive” authority over the regulation of oil and gas operations in the state.
- On February 11, 2015, Representative Ryan Smith introduced Ohio House Bill 64 (the Bill), the governor’s proposed 2016-2017 biennial budget bill. As Governor John Kasich previously announced, the Bill contains a number of Ohio tax proposals, including reform of Ohio’s severance taxes.
- The language of Governor Kasich’s 2016-2017 biennial budget bill was recently released. House Bill 64 has 84,757 lines and 2,783 pages of text. Many of the details track very closely to summaries of the bill announced during the preceding weeks. The proposal includes significantly reduced personal income tax rates, continued and expanded small business income tax exclusions and higher personal exemptions.
- On February 9, 2015, the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) proposed rules to implement Section 955 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which directs the SEC to require, by rule, each public company to disclose in any proxy or consent solicitation material for an annual meeting of the shareholders of the company whether any employee or director, or any designee of such employee or director, is permitted to hedge the company’s equity securities.
- Courts continue to whittle away at the public disclosure bar, historically one of the best ways to dispose of parasitic qui tam lawsuits. Most recently, the Eleventh Circuit issued a ruling regarding the impact of the 2010 amendments to the False Claims Act’s (FCA) public disclosure rule. In its opinion in U.S. ex rel. Osheroff v. Humana, Inc., the Eleventh Circuitjoined the Fourth Circuit in holding that the public disclosure rule, as amended in 2010, is no longer a jurisdictional bar to an FCA action. Instead, under the amended version of the statute, defendants now must move to dismiss allegations that have been publicly disclosed under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6).
- Whitney Gibson, the leader of the firm’s internet defamation practice, authored an article for Social Media Explorer titled “Strategies for Legally Generating and Monitoring Online Reviews.”
- FLSA claims involving off-the-clock work have become a popular claim in recent years. A recent Eleventh Circuit ruling has made employer defenses to such lawsuits a bit more challenging. In Bailey v. TitleMax of Ga., Inc. (11th Cir., No. 14-11747, 1/15/15), the employer argued that the plaintiff’s claims should be barred because the plaintiff failed to report all hours worked, which caused the company to under-compensate the plaintiff.
- In a much anticipated opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an Idaho district court’s order mandating the unwind of a merger between two health care providers in Nampa, Idaho after determining that the merger violated § 7 of the Clayton Act. In the wake of the FTC’s recent and heightened enforcement in the health care industry, St. Alphonsus Medical Center-Nampa, Inc. v. St. Luke’s Health System, Ltd., No. 14-35173, (9th Cir. Feb. 10, 2015), offers important insight into the hotly debated interplay between the integration encouraged under the Affordable Care Act and the operation of federal antitrust laws.
- A recent Sixth Circuit opinion provides defendants a valuable roadmap for using government witness testimony to defeat False Claims Act (FCA) claims on materiality grounds at the summary judgment stage. In U.S. ex rel. American Systems Consulting, Inc. v. ManTech Advanced Systems Int’l Inc., Case No. 14-3269 (6th Cir.), the court rejected the relator’s argument that materiality decisions should be left to a jury. Instead, the court expressly held that “a judge may decide as a matter of law whether a misrepresentation was material under the FCA.”
- Ohio Governor John Kasich recently outlined the tax changes he will include in his 2016-2017 biennial state budget. The governor’s proposal is a mixture of cuts, increases and elimination of taxes which he says will result in a net $500 million tax cut for Ohioans. The taxes included in his package are: sales tax, commercial activity tax, oil and gas severance tax, individual income tax and tobacco tax.
- Groucho Marx once said that “politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” So as we welcome the 131st Ohio General Assembly, we already have the introduction of pro-employee wage-and-hour legislation. On February 2, 2015, Senator Kenny Yuko (D-Richmond Heights) introduced Senate Bill 25 which would make significant changes to Ohio’s employment laws.
February
Monica F. OathoutInsights
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