Recently, the Nebraska Unicameral amended one of the statutes within the Nebraska Wage Payment & Collection Act. The amended statute now requires all Nebraska employers to provide their employees with wage statements on each regular payday. Although many employers already provide employees with wage statements each payday, the Act has never required wage statements (except upon an employee’s written request), nor has the amendment received much (if any) publicity that we were able to find. As such, we wanted to draw your attention to this new payroll requirement.
As amended, the Act now requires that on “each regular payday” an employer must deliver wage statements to employees, or must otherwise make wage statements available to employees. The wage statement must identify the employer’s name, the hours for which the employee was paid, the wages that the employee earned, and the deductions that were taken from those wages. There is a small exception for employees who are exempt from the overtime regulations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, in that the employer does not need to include a listing of the hours worked for those employees. However, if the employer has a policy or practice of (1) paying overtime to exempt employees, or (2) calculating bonuses or other payments using hours worked, then the employer will need to include “hours worked” for all employees regardless of exempt status.
This legislation goes into effect on July 18, 2014 – one month from today – so employers should be ready to provide all employees with compliant wage statements beginning the first regular payday following that date. Bear in mind, though, that the bill only requires that wage statements be “made available” to employees and, for that reason, if there is a means for providing wage statements to employees electronically – such as through email or a web portal – employers can avoid the added expense of printing and/or mailing statements to employees.
For more information, please contact our Labor & Employment Practice Group. We encourage you to subscribe to our Labor & Employment E-Briefs to get the latest HR news, tips, and updates.