FAQ 600: Eligibility--Employees who never worked 1000 hours should not be eligible for the plan

Problem:

I have a question on plan entry dates as calculated by the system, and, in your FAQ I found a similar question. The question concerns the system giving an entry date to a participant that even though they have been an employee for two or more years, they have never had 1000 hours in a plan year to actually enter the plan.

Your answer was that the system uses an eligibility computation period from date of hire to anniversary date of hire, prorating the hours.

Is there any way around this? We do not want entry dates for participants who have never had 1000 hours in a plan year.



Solution:

You can handle this in one of two ways. If the employee will never be eligible for the plan because they will never work more than 1000 hours, you can code them as "Part-time" on the Dates and Status screen. This will eliminate them from any allocations or testing.

Alternatively, you can code their historical hours as less than the hours they actually worked. The goal is to not have >1000 hours in the period of time from their date of hire to the anniversary of their date of hire. In general, hours less than 500 will accomplish this, or 1 hour to be on the safe side.