Agenda - Council - 09/13/2022 - Laserfiche WebLink

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a. PUBLIC SECTOR CAPACITY AND WORKFORCE Public Safety, Public Health, and Human Services Staff Summary of Interim Final Rule: Under the interim final rule, funds may be used for payroll and covered benefits241 for public safety, public health, health care, human services, and similar employees242 of a recipient government, for the portion of the employee's time that is spent responding to COVID-19. For administrative convenience, the recipient may consider public health and safety employees to be entirely devoted to responding to COVID-19, and therefore their full payroll and covered benefits eligible to be covered, if the employee, or his or her operating unit or division, is "primarily dedicated" to responding to COVID-19, meaning that more than half of the employee, unit, or division's time is dedicated to responding to COVID-19. Recipients may consider other presumptions for assessing the extent to which an employee, division, or operating unit is responding to COVID-19. Recipients must periodically reassess their determination and maintain records to support their assessment, such as payroll records, attestations from supervisors or staff, or regular work product or correspondence; recipients need not track staff hours. The interim final rule also posed a question on how long recipients should be able to use funds for staff responding to COVID-19 and what other measures or presumptions 241 In general, if an employee's wages and salaries are an eligible use of SLFRF funds, recipients may treat the employee's covered benefits as an eligible use of SLFRF funds. For purposes of SLFRF funds, covered benefits include costs of all types of leave (vacation, family -related, sick, military, bereavement, sabbatical, jury duty), employee insurance (health, life, dental, vision), retirement (pensions, 401(k)), unemployment benefit plans (federal and state), workers compensation insurance, and Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) taxes (which includes Social Security and Medicare taxes). As described further in the section Deposits into Pension Funds in Restrictions on Use, that limitation on use does not apply to pension contributions that are part of regular payroll contributions for employees whose wages and salaries are an eligible use of SLFRF funds. 242 Note that the interim final rule adapted prior guidance issued for CRF that described these four categories of employees; however, when listing the specific occupations or types of employees in each of these categories, the guidance collapses health care and public health into one category titled "public health." Therefore, the presumption described around public health employees also covers health care employees. 172