We recently had an open enrollment for our health care plan. On the enrollment form there were several employees that listed individuals as children or spouse altho their last name is different from our employee. My question is what type of document may we ask them to provide for verification of the legal relationship? Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!!!

Coming from North America's largest insurance carrier, we did not request proof of a dependent. Unless your carrier is specifically requesting this information, it may not be needed.

If the children have different last names, I would not even bother. With so many remarriages these days, it seems almost impossible to not have employees whose children have different last names.

If the spouse has a different last name, I would just address it with your employee. Obviously there aren't too many women that keep their maiden name once married. That's even something that would draw a red flag from an insurance carrier. Do you allow for domestic partnerships or common law marriages (required in some states)? If you do, carriers have domestic partnership and common law marriage affidavits that need to be filled out in certain instances. Your best bet would then be to go back to your carrier and ask, what do you need to be filled out?

I hope this helps! If you would like to discuss further, do not hesitate to send me an email!

Take Care,

Matt

My employer is a Fortune 100 company, with a bunch of locations and plans. In general, we do not require proof of either marriage or dependent children, mostly because we agree with mroberts' comments.

However, lying about dependents is a breach of our Code of Conduct, and grounds for discliplinary action up to and including termination of employment.

How would we find out? The only case I know of is one where the employee was bragging about outsmarting the company, and the story worked it's way back to the local HR administrator.

RCK