News and Updates
Category: Unemployment
2024 Spring Cleaning
Things are in bloom in Ohio, which is a sure sign of spring…even on the days it doesn’t feel like it. For many people, this means spring cleaning - opening windows, organizing the garage, and getting rid of outmoded things that don’t really serve you anymore. Your business relationships should be evaluated right along with those beat-up gardening gloves that you’re hesitating to throw out. Employers have good intentions of doing this at the end of the year, but things get in the way and it often doesn’t happen. So why not do some spring cleaning with your vendors and administrative tasks? Here are some questions you might want to consider: Has your payroll processor been easy for both you and your employees to reach with questions or urgent issues? Is your workers’ comp TPA proactively managing claims in addition to processing paperwork? Is Ohio BWC’s one-size-fits-all approach working for you? If your company offers FMLA, does your staff feel 100% confident managing the program and claims from a compliance perspective? Did your broker do their best to shop and present you with the best renewal options? Are they talking to you about different plan designs, or only fully-funded? Unemployment claims and fraud have both been running rampant. Is that a task you want to keep in-house? Is your EMR in the right range to win RFPs, and pass checks with vetting software like ISNetWorld and Avetta? If yo
How SuretyHR Fits Into the Spooner Family
You may have noticed some of the SuretyHR content looks a lot like the content published on Spooner Inc’s website and LinkedIn. Maybe you also picked up on our employees having multiple logos on their emails, or you might have both Surety and Spooner business cards for the same employee. We get plenty of questions about this, so we want to help you make sense of it all. Surety HR is part of the Spooner Risk Control family of companies. Spooner Inc (our TPA) and Spooner Medical Administrators (our MCO) both have long and storied histories of helping employers navigate the claimant-favoring, monopolistic Ohio workers’ compensation system. We’ve saved thousands of companies hundreds of thousands of dollars, with some even into the millions with our claims and program management. As Ohio BWC continued making changes to programs, eligibility and inflating administrative costs, we found that offering solutions for only our state-fund and self-insured clients wasn’t enough. Enter SuretyHR, our professional employer organization (PEO). We began building the departments that would make up Surety HR in 2015, with the addition of payroll services. By 2017, we had added in-house legal counsel, HR experts and additional support to our existing teams handling workers’ comp, safety, unemployment, and absence management. In September 2019, we were granted self-insured status by Ohio BWC, which greatly increased the amount of savings we could
Surety HR: Not Your Average PEO
When we talk to prospects about Surety HR, our self-insured PEO (professional employer organization), we get a lot of very different reactions - confusion, curiosity, blank stares and occasionally – a crossed-arm refusal to hear anything else about it. We knew when we began building our PEO that several employers have a bad taste in their mouth about PEOs, usually after having (or hearing about) a bad experience. That’s one of the many reasons we sought out these opinions to help build our framework based on what employers feel does or does not work. The biggest thing we want to make clear is that we are not our competition. We don’t charge based on a percentage of payroll, baking everything together so that you’ll never really know how much you’re paying for any of our services. When employers are looking for some of the solutions a PEO can provide, they are not always looking to move all their employment-related needs under one umbrella. This is why larger, mature, and sophisticated companies have avoided entering into a PEO relationship. Surety HR is a sister company of Spooner Incorporated – an unrivaled TPA and consulting firm with less than 2% client turnover. Because of this foundation, our focus is more on lowering workers’ comp premiums instead of bundling services that you may not need or want. It also means if and when you decide it’s time to exit the PEO, the process will b
