Canadian Payroll Reporter

News Published 12 times a year by Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd. Subscription rate: $179 per year Customer Service Tel: (416) 609-3800 (Toronto) (800) 387-5164 (outside Toronto) Fax: (416) 298-5106 E-mail: carswell.customerrelations @thomsonreuters.com Website: www.carswell.com One Corporate Plaz 2075 Kennedy Road Toronto, Ontario, Canada M1T 3V4 Director, Carswell Media Karen Lorimer Publisher John Hobel Associate Publisher/Managing Editor Todd Humber Editor Sheila Brawn sbrawn@rogers.com Lead Editor Sarah Dobson Assistant Editor Mallory Hendry (on leave) Assistant Editor Anastasiya Jogal Marketing Manager Mohammad Ali mm.ali@thomsonreuters.com (416) 609-5866 Circulation Co-ordinator Keith Fulford keith.fulford@thomsonreuters.com (416) 649-9585 Payroll Reporter Can R Can R adian adian a www.payroll-reporter.com ©2015 Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd ISBN/ISSN: 978-0-7798-2810-4 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher (Carswell, a Thomson Reuters business). Return Mail Registration # 1522825 | Return Postage Guaranteed Paid News Revenue Toronto Canadian Payroll Reporter is part of the Canadian HR Reporter group of publications: • Canadian HR Reporter — www.hrreporter.com • Canadian Occupational Safety magazine — www.cos-mag.com • Canadian Payroll Reporter — www.payroll-reporter.com • Canadian Employment Law Today — www.employmentlawtoday.com • Canadian Labour Reporter — www.labour-reporter.com See carswell.com for information July 2015 | CPR Vacation deferral rules vary by jurisdiction year. An employee cannot there- fore agree to forego the vacation entitlement in any stub period or vacation entitlement year until the completion of that stub peri- od or vacation entitlement year," the policy manual says. In Nova Scotia and Prince Ed- ward Island, part-time employees are allowed to waive their vaca- tion entitlement if they work less than 90 per cent of their employ- er's regular working hours in any continuous 12-month period. In all cases where an employee foregoes their vacation, they are not giving up their right to vaca- tion pay — employers must still pay it within the required time. Some jurisdictions have rules covering the deferral of vaca- tions for employees on a leave of absence. In Quebec, employees taking family or parental leaves, reservist leaves or leaves for sick- ness, accident or organ donation may ask to defer their vacation to the following year if they are off work at the end of the 12-month period by which they must take their vacation. It is up to the em- ployer to decide whether to allow the request. If it says no, it must pay the vacation pay owing. In Ontario, employees who are on leaves allowed under the Employment Standards Act, 2000 may defer their vacation if the 10-month deadline for tak- ing the two-week vacation re- quired by law comes while they are on leave. Employees may take the vacation as soon as their leave ends or, if they and their employer agree, at a later date. The act also allows for de- ferrals for employees on leave who work under an employ- ment contract that restricts or forbids vacation deferrals. The policy manual says this could be the case if an employer provides more than the legislated mini- mum of two weeks' vacation, but has a "use it or lose it" policy that requires employees to take the extra vacation weeks by a certain date every year (such as Dec. 31). To ensure employees who are on leave when the deadline comes do not lose their vacation entitlement or have to give up some of their leave, the act al- lows employees to defer the va- cation until their leave ends or, if they and their employer agree, to a later date. It is essential payroll and HR departments keep up-to- date and detailed records, with documents that show each em- ployee's entitlement to vacation, vacation requests and approvals, vacation dates and duration, va- cation pay owing and paid and whether an employee deferred or waived a vacation, as well as written agreements/approvals for the deferral or waiver. Payroll and HR should peri- odically review vacation poli- cies and records and compare them against labour standards requirements in all of the juris- dictions in which they operate to make sure they are complying with the law. It is better to find and correct a problem before a labour standards board comes calling. from POLICIES on page 6 "So (the board of directors) decided that in a jurisdiction this small, it's better to stick with the collective liability and not try to assess everybody on their own individual performance." She says super-assessments encourage individual employer accountability without driving companies out of business. "We're not looking at hun- dreds of thousands of dollars. We're looking at thousands or tens of thousands for a really large employer. It's not a bank- rupting type of levy. It's just enough to say, 'Hey you need to pay some of this back into the system because you are costing us way more than you are paying in,'" Vanderbyl says. The amount an employer is charged will be based on the dif- ference between the employer's actual claims costs and three times its rate group average, mul- tiplied by a factor that is based on the number of times the employ- er has been super-assessed. For a first super-assessment, the factor will be 10 per cent. For each sub- sequent super-assessment, the factor will increase by 10 percent- age points, up to 100 per cent. Vanderbyl says she expects if an employer is going to get a su- per-assessment, the charge will come shortly after the employer files its annual payroll return at the end of February each year. A super-assessment would re- main in effect until the employ- er's claims costs are below the super-assessment threshold or the board considers the employ- er's injury prevention practices and procedures to be adequate. This means the employer must meet the minimum re- quirements of the territory's oc- cupational health and safety and workers' compensation legisla- tion, be free of penalties, fines or prosecutions pending against it at the time the board reconsid- ers the super-assessment and it must pass a safety management system review. If the employer ends up back on the super-assessment list, the board will levy the charge at the level the employer was last at. "You don't go back to zero, so there is always a risk for em- ployers who have been super- assessed," says Vanderbyl. "That is pretty good motivation and people will get the picture that we're not out there to grab your money — we're out there to save lives and to prevent disability be- cause that's our mandate." Employers that receive a super-assessment are still ex- pected to pay regular annual as- sessments and to complete and submit yearly payroll returns. Payroll may be the depart- ment that will have to process and pay a super-assessment. from YUKON on page 3 Factor can increase

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