- Posts by Heather Stone Fletcher
Member of the FirmPublic and private employers turn to attorney Heather Stone Fletcher for guidance on compliance and regulatory matters affecting employee benefit plans and executive compensation.
Heather advises employers on the design ...
“ERISA, you’ll need a lawyer for that.” Our practice group’s tagline is meant to be a shorthand for the alphabet soup of laws that apply to employee benefits, including the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). Employee benefits compliance has many traps for the unwary and is ever evolving. Below, we have provided a primer on current issues of importance in the employee benefits area to help in-house attorneys identify potential risks, mitigate them, and know when to call an outside ERISA lawyer.
1. What Is Old Is New: Get Your Health Plan Governance in Order
Employers that sponsor self-funded health plans have a host of complicated obligations. There are greater potential legal, regulatory, and fiduciary risks than in years past with managing health plans because of increased congressional legislation, increased Department of Labor (DOL) focus on group health plan compliance, and increased group health plan litigation, often by the same plaintiffs’ firms that have been suing 401(k) plans in fee litigation the past 20 years or more.
On May 9, 2025, the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Treasury (collectively, “the Departments”) asked the D.C. federal court to suspend a lawsuit to challenge the legality of the 2024 Rule on the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) while the Departments consider whether to rescind or modify the 2024 Rule.[1] On May 15, 2025, the Departments released a public statement that they will not enforce the 2024 Final Rule prior to a final decision in the litigation, plus an additional 18 months after the decision.
The public statement on May 15 provides further details regarding the scope of the non-enforcement policy, including clarification that the 2013 MHPAEA rules remain in effect, as does plans’ obligation to develop comparative analyses of non-quantitative treatment limits (“NQTLs”). However, the Departments have not yet provided any indication of the timeline for publishing a notice of proposed rulemaking to rescind or modify the 2024 Rule, and most likely it will take some time for the Departments to determine how exactly the new rule should be designed to better implement the statutory requirements.
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