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Info on employees

LauraAKLauraAK 4 Posts
in HR & Employment Law Vote Up0Vote Down
The situation: The ex-wife of a former employee contacted our HR dept to find out if their 2 children were still covered under our company insurance plan. The former employee and ex do not communicate & she needed to know this info. She was told that his employment was terminated on such & such a date and that as of such & such a date the kids were no longer covered (she was informed about COBRA). The ex contacted the former employee to chew him out for not letting her know this important information since he was under court order to provide medical insurance for their children. The former employee sent a nasty email to the HR dept stating that we had no right to inform her that he was no longer employed with us & threatened to pursue legal action if our communication with the ex was not immediately stopped.
Question: Was it illegal to give out the above information? No financial or personal info was revealed of course, we will only state an employee's dates of hire and the position they held.
Thank You for your time!
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Comments

  • 5 Comments sorted by Votes Date Added
  • HatchetmanHatchetman 877 Posts
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    [font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 07-09-01 AT 07:13PM (CST)[/font][p]Without knowing your specific state laws, if any, that may augment federal COBRA or speak to the confidentialiity of emplyment records, I suspect you did violate some privacy for the ex-employee by disclosing his 'non-employment" status without authorization or court order. The COBRa issue of course is something else, and you certainly were right to indicate she had a right to file for COBRA coverage for the children and what it means.

    I think the ex-employee may have failed his legal obligation under COBRA to have notified the company of the divorce. Certainly the beneficiary has a right to notify the company of the change and then that obligates the company to follow up with proper notification of rights to the beneficiary, which under the law, I think is a two week period for notification. So that part of it in which you notified the ex of the need for COBRA coverage was right. As I said, the issue may be whether you needed to have identified that her ex and the children's father no longer worked for you.
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  • Mike Maslanka TXMike Maslanka 236 Posts
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    did you tell her that he was terminated and end it there or was there some detail that you got into?also,has he done anything to make his termination a matter of public record,such as filing for unemployment?...a lot depends on the way your comment was phrased to the wife,but don't lose any sleep over this---you were helping a single mom find out if she had coverage for the kids,which is a good thing,and i bet dollars to donuts that the fired employee blabbed all over town about being fired...regards from texas,mike maslanka
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  • LauraAKLauraAK 4 Posts
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    I asked our employee and she said that the ex asked her to define "terminated", so she informed her that he was laid off due to budget cut backs (which is true). By saying that, I think she didn't want to make the former employee look as bad as he would if he'd voluntarily quit. Our employee informed the ex that her children were no longer covered under our plan due to the event of the termination of employment. She doesn't feel that she did anything wrong, and our department pretty much agrees, but we want to know how to handle such a situation if it ever occurs again. If a mistake was made then we surely will learn from it, hopefully not through a lawsuit though!
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  • Thomas Daniel AKThomas Daniel AK 3 Posts
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    TThere is no prohibition in Alaska against employers giving out the dates of employment of a former employee. There is a small risk, in the situation described that the empoyer might have given out some information that the former employee would claim was false. If the empoyer did give out false information, the employer could be sued for libel or slander.
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  • GarGar 347 Posts
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    It seems to me that you have the right to tell anyone who calls/writes in whether a person is or isn't employed with your firm. Since the ex-wife isn't an employer, I wouldn't have disclosed the employment dates and since she isn't a former employee, I wouldn't have disclosed the COBRA information. This could have been handled better but, all-in-all, I don't see a real problem with what was done.
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