Your Questions Answered

YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED

Have a personnel-related or business tax question? Members can get free information from CBIA’s experts. The phone number is 860-244-1900.

Q: We have hired a new employee who will be working 32 hours per week. She wants to work four eight-hour days, without a lunch break each day. Is that OK? One of our supervisors says that any employee who works for eight hours is required to take a meal break.

A: Under Connecticut law (CGS section 31-51ii), any employee who works for seven and one-half consecutive hours is entitled to a half-hour unpaid meal break between the first two hours and the last two hours of work. Employees may not be required to forego a meal break, although an employee and employer are permitted to “enter into a written agreement providing for a different schedule of meal periods.” This means that your employee can voluntarily request to forego lunch, and you are free to agree to the arrangement. Be sure to get her request in writing and have a signed, written agreement about her schedule.

Other exceptions to the required meal break are situations where:

requiring compliance could put the public safety at risk;

a position may be performed by only one employee;

there are four or fewer employees on a shift in the same facility; or

the continuous nature of an employer’s operations, such as chemical production or research, requires that employees be available to respond to urgent or unusual conditions at all times.

Employers may not apply these exemptions automatically, but must request and receive approval from the state Labor Department. The law also exempts employers from the half-hour unpaid meal-break requirement if employees are provided 30 or more minutes of paid rest — for example, two 15-minute paid breaks — during the seven-and-one-half-hour work period. Few employers adopt this practice, however, and any employer that does must be prepared to show that the employees did in fact take those paid breaks.

Q: One of our employees initially declined our group health coverage because she was covered under her spouse’s employer’s plan. The spouse’s employer recently decided to switch coverage — from an indemnity plan to an HMO — and our employee does not like the new coverage. She now wants to switch to our plan. Do the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) special enrollment rules apply to this situation?

A: No. An employee who declined coverage because he or she had other coverage has the right to special enrollment under HIPAA only if the employee:

loses the other coverage (or exhausts COBRA coverage);

marries (at which time the spouse may also be enrolled); or

acquires a new dependent by virtue of birth or adoption (employee, spouse and child may enroll).

HIPAA does not require special enrollment when there has merely been a change in coverage.

Q: I am a sole proprietor and would like to hire my teenage kids to do some work around the office. Are there any tax advantages to hiring them?

A: Possibly. Make sure you compensate them in a reasonable manner for the services they perform. If your children do photocopying, for example, pay them the going rate for that service. The salary you pay your children would be a tax-deductible business expense, and their income would be tax-free up to that year’s standard deduction for a single taxpayer. Any income the children earn in excess of that amount would be taxed at the applicable single-taxpayer rate. In addition, if any of your children are under 18, the wages you pay them would not be subject to payroll taxes.

Q: During a recent routine sales and use tax audit, an examiner said I owed an additional tax that has never come up before in any of our other audits. I don’t think the tax applies to my business at all. What can I do?

A: You can request an informal conference with the unit chief of the regional office of the Department of Revenue Services before any assessment is made. If the dispute involves any question of law or procedure that cannot be resolved at the regional office level, you may request an informal conference with the audit management office in Hartford.