According to the SBA, half of the small businesses between three and 10 people don’t provide health care, but would like to offer it.  According to the US Treasury, the Affordable Care Act contains provisions that would allow up to a 35% tax credit for qualifying businesses, who may receive both state and federal tax credits. Fortunately, determining whether your business qualifies for those credits just became much easier.  

As always, you should consult your attorney or tax advisor for advice tailored to your situation.  However, the government has made it easier to determine where your business falls thanks to new guidance issued by the IRS and the US Treasury Department.  On May 17, 2010, the Treasury issued release TG-698, which outlines some common scenarios.  The IRS has issued a more in-depth publication via IRS Notice 2010-44 (pdf). Here are some of the highlights:

Getting Money For Health Care: Combined Credits up to 75%
If you're a business in Texas, the 35% credit is a welcome step, allowing for federal credits where no direct credits were previously available.  In other states that do provide direct assistance, the combined federal-state credits can cover up to 75% of an employer's premium costs.

Federal Tax Credits
A common adage is that "the devil is in the details," and that's often true with the transition between legislative action and implementation.  However, based upon the recent guidance, the new Act's provisions look like they'll be implemented generously. Beginning immediately in 2010, businesses may be able to claim up to a 35% tax credit for health care premiums.  Starting in 2014, that number increases to a 50% federal credit.

"Health Insurance Coverage" is defined broadly.  In addition to the traditional medical insurance, the Section 45(R) credit includes dental, vision, and other limited-scope coverage.  There is an explicit allowance in the IRS Notice for long-term care, home nursing care, disease-specific riders like cancer coverage, "or any combination thereof".  There are some restrictions, such as requiring a minimum 50% employer contribution, and each must be a stand-alone qualifying arrangement, but your tax advisor, insurance agent, or legal counsel should be able to help you determine whether your current offering qualifies and what changes or tweaks may be needed to ensure compliance.

State Tax Incentives

The new Act does not reduce federal credits based on state benefits, unless the combination would exceed the employer's contribution. State tax incentives are monetary incentives usually provided by tax credits or deductions that reduce your businesses' tax bill. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) provides a summary of Employer Health Coverage Tax Incentives for businesses in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Wisconsin.

State Premium Assistance
Premium assistance is money available for direct or indirect payment or reduction of premiums. Unlike tax-driven incentives, premium assistance can be un-bundled from the tax system and potentially provides another avenue to defray costs for tax-disadvantaged businesses. The NCSL maintains a list of premium assistance programs for businesses in Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Washington, and Tennessee.

Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) allow for tax-free accounts that are usually coupled with high-deductible insurance that provide an alternative to traditional premium-only insurance. The NCSL also provides a list of health savings account (HSA) programs that interested businesses should review.

Employer and Plan Eligibility Requirements

The tax credits are often referred to as "Small Business Health Care Credits".  But who is a small business?  Fortunately, the IRS guidance allows for some flexibility in this definition. In order to be an eligible small employer, "(1) the employer must have fewer than 25 full-time equivalent employees (FTEs) for the taxable year; (2) the average annual wages of its employees for the year must be less than $50,000 per FTE; and (3) the employer must maintain a “qualifying arrangement.” --IRS Notice, SII(A)

A "qualifying arrangement" is one where the employer pays at least 50% of the per-employee premium on a uniform percentage.  There are some caveats for 2010 due to the implementation phase-in, so if you plan to claim a 2010 credit, be sure to ask your advisor about the 2010 rules.

Under the IRS guidance, employers can elect for the most favorable method of determining FTE hours (full time equivalent).  This is important for eligibility because the tax credit is highest for employers with 10 or fewer FTE employees. Benefits extend up to 25 FTE employees, and the employer is able to choose whether to look to actual hours of service, or can use estimated hours based on total days or weeks of service.  

The calculation is basically a five-step approach:

1. Determine the employees who are taken into account
2. Determine the number of hours of service performed by those employees
3. Calculate the number of the employer’s FTEs.
4. Determine the average annual wages paid per FTE.
5. Determine the premiums paid by the employer for a qualifying arrangement under section 45(R)

The full IRS Notice 2010-44 contains all of the details, as well as example scenarios for common business situations.

Some Cautionary Notes

As with any law, the actual legislation isn't without caveats.  For example, while the tax credit is scheduled to increase to 50% in 2014, the credit is only available for six years total, unless amended. Businesses can claim the credit in tax years 2010 to 2013, and for two additional years thereafter. Based on these numbers, the plan is expected to save small businesses up to $40 billion through 2019.  The flip side of that is that the government will lose the same amount in tax revenue, if not made up by other sources. Also, lawmakers were also worried about so-called "Cadillac Plans" and therefore, the eligible contribution iscapped based on the average cost of health insurance in your state. 

As I've mentioned, the typical disclaimers apply: This post is provided as general information, and is not intended as legal advice.  The applicability of this information will vary based upon countless variables unique to your business, and the legality and applicability of this information will vary depending upon your jurisdiction.  You should always consult a professional, such as your attorney, accountant, or tax advisor before making decisions. IRS CIRCULAR 230 DISCLOSURE: While this information is not considered legal advice, any tax-related information contained in this communication (including any attachments or links) is not intended or written to be used, and cannot be used, by any taxpayer for the purpose of (1) avoiding tax-related penalties under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code or (2) promoting, marketing or recommending to another party any tax-related matters addressed herein. 

How to run multiple Acrobat OCR batches at once:

 I was about to dive into a document review project today and ran into some "technical challenges". Here's how it worked out.  Hopefully this will save others some time in the future.

The Situation
Today's another one of those days ... my morning started out in a room stacked full of boxes of documents that were produced to us.  Now, I need to make sense out of these and find those proverbial needles in the haystack.  Fortunately, the tedious scanning process was already done for me, and I had PDF copies of the production on discs.

The Goal
The immediate goal is to go through the documents and look for key words and phrases, with a more in-depth review guided by a roadmap that is developed today. The quickest way to do this is to make the documents searchable. Often, you can get a scanning service provider (or your own scanner/copier) to perform OCR text recognition during the scanning process.  In this case, we received the documents as un-processed PDFs, so the recognition had to be done in-house.

The Problem -- Speed
Today's desktop computers often have plenty of horsepower.  This particular job was run on a dual-core Mac Mini desktop with 4GB of RAM.  However, Adobe Acrobat is single-threaded for OCR.  What that means is, you can tell it to batch process multiple documents, but it goes through them sequentially, one at a time.  When you have thousands, or hundreds of thousands of documents, this poses a real problem.

I started the batch as normal, by going to Adobe Acrobat Pro's "Document" menu and selecting "Recognize text in multiple files using OCR ...".  I added the files from our Windows (SMB) file share and set it to work.  After a few hundred pages, it was clear that this approach wasn't going to be finished in any reasonable amount of time.  What I needed was concurrency.  From my processor usage graph, I could tell that my computer had plenty of spare cycles, but that Acrobat just wasn't using them effectively.  

The Solution
One approach that I've used in the past is simply to split up the job across several different computers. This is fine if you have enough computers, but it's still inefficient and ties up several machines in the office with each one running at less than peak speed. 

Step 1: More Acrobat!
This time, I took a different approach.  I made a copy of the Acrobat application in the Finder.  

Step 2: Queue up Jobs.
Now, you can launch each copy of Acrobat separately and add documents to each one's queue independently.  However, to do this right, you'll need a license for each concurrent copy of Acrobat.  I reviewed their retail license and it looks like they define "the Software" in such a way that it's licensed per copy, not per computer.  The backup copy provision probably doesn't cover concurrent usage. In my case, I had two retail copies of Acrobat as well as another copy that was bundled in my Adobe Creative Suite package. If you have a site license or other agreement with Adobe, your licensing may be different. 

Step 3: Doubled Productivity (or more).
Most desktop computers these days are dual-core systems or better.  On the Mac Mini, running two copies of Acrobat is the most efficient, with each one loading up a different processor core.  If you had a high-end machine with 8 cores, (and 8 copies of Acrobat) you could linearly scale up the workload. Another advantage to running multiple copies is that you can get work done in one copy while another copy runs the batch processing.  If you're on a Mac, you can also use the bult-in Preview.app program to read and review PDF files while your Acrobat is running OCR jobs.  Sadly, Preview.app doesn't do OCR on its own.

The Take-Away
Running multiple Acrobat jobs on one computer beats tying up several different systems at once. However, licensing issues can be a pain if you want to run a large number of concurrent jobs.  For full-time production, I'd stick with a copy provider or hardware scanner that provides OCR.  You can also get standalone software like ABBYY FineReader that specializes in OCR.  For small jobs, even Google Docs can now OCR documents.  When it comes down to it, these kind of work-arounds shouldn't be necessary.  Acrobat is a "professional" product (it says so on the box !) It's inexcusable that Acrobat Pro doesn't run batch jobs like this in parallel.  At a minimum, it could parallelize page recognition, even if it attacked documents sequentially.  But, until Adobe does a bit more to modernize its Acrobat product line, a bit of creativity and an additional tithe to Adobe can still get the job done quickly.

A final caveat: As part of this process, I discovered that Acrobat also has a propensity to crash when it tries to save batch-processed documents to a network SMB server.  So, be sure to save to the local disk then copy back to your file server when done.  Reading directly from the server doesn't seem to be an issue. Finally, I'm trying out Amazon's program, so some of the links in this post are affiliate links - http://cmp.ly/5

While some lawyers ply their trade primarily in the courtroom, the reality is that most of us spend the majority of our time on written work product, not eloquent jury arguments.  This week, I came across two links that are quick reads and have the potential to markedly improve work product with little time invested.

The first is Typography For Lawyers. The site is run by Matthew Butterick, an attorney in Los Angeles. His pre-law background is graphic design and typography, with experience running a website development studio.  I also came from a non-law (and web programming/design) background and thus the attention to presentation that he's advocating really resonated with me.  I spent several years helping attorneys gain maximum impact in the courtroom by applying good presentation skills to their in-trial advocacy.  Mr. Butterick makes the point that those same principles can apply to your written work as well:

When you speak to a judge, do you stand at the lectern, eyes cast downward, and read from a script in a monotone? No, of course not. To maintain the judge’s attention during your argument, you change the speed and volume of your delivery; you gesture; you extemporize. You do this because you don’t merely want to be heard—you want to persuade. The text matters, but so does the presentation.

So it is on the printed page. The text matters, but if that’s all that mattered, then everything could be set in 12-point Times New Roman. And that would be the equivalent of staring at the lectern.

Typography is always important because presentation is always important. 

The second resource I'd like to point out today is an article entitled 4 Danger Signs To Search For, Before Sending Off Your Novel by Charlie Jane Anders.  The tips from that article may be geared to fiction writers, but they apply also to legal writing. A few quick word searches through your pleadings for these warning signs can improve the final product with a minimal time investment. I highly recommend hitting the link to read the full article, but the TLDR version of what to watch out for is:

1) Adverbs. In a nutshell, you do a search for "ly" in your manuscript. 

2) Sentences beginning with "It." The main problem with "it" is that it's a pronoun, so you must be absolutely clear about what "it" refers to. And when a sentence begins with "it," that can be another red flag pointing to bad writing.

3) There was, or there were. Most people will tell you to keep your use of the verb "to be" to an absolute minimum. But you can't avoid using "is" or "was" altogether, and like everything else, "to be" has its place in your prose ... But you absolutely should do a quick search for "there was" and "there were" — which are pretty clearcut instances of the verb "to be" flopping around when a stronger verb could be flexing its muscles. 

4) Was being, or were being. Just as most experts will tell you to avoid the verb "to be" as much as possible, they'll also warn you away from passive verbs.

 

I'm frequently a passive voice offender in my early drafts and in casual writing. Therefore, I religiously scrub my writing for passive voice whenever I have the time.  With the four suggestions above, I can add a few checkboxes to my quick-search routine.  Maybe one day I'll even have the discipline to apply those to my blog posts =D.

I came across this article published at the American Mathematical Society as part of my morning reading:

Moving Remy in Harmony: Pixar's Use of Harmonic Functions

It's a really interesting discussion of how various geometric formulae are used to enable the characters to move in a natural way.  I think exposing this kind of real-world application of relatively easy-to-understand concepts is a great way for educators to show their students how seemingly austere concepts can be made to do "fun" things that apply to their own lives. 

The animation shops that lead their field today draw upon the talents of artists, mathematicians, programmers, and many other disciplines to tell a compelling story.  The viewer gets to look through the mind's eye of the storyteller, but only because countless professionals have plied their trade to make it all work seamlessly.

So, next time you wonder that "tan" or "cos" key on your calculator is for, just think of talking mice ...

[Fair Use Statement:  The image of Remy from Pixar Studios' Ratatouille may be a copyright of Disney/Pixar and used, if at all, herein  for nonprofit educational purposes, and is an insubstantial portion of the work as a whole that does not significantly impact the value or market of the original work.  Any images displayed in this post are links to a third party source and are not hosted or supplied by the author. ]

I wrote about Clear when it was first launched in San Antonio.  The TLDR version of that article is that I had mixed feelings about the service from a business perspective, but felt that the technology was promising.  I've been using Clear's service now for almost four months, and that article has gotten some decent traffic and cross-links, so another update is due.  Here are the big changes since I last looked at them:

The pricing "for life" pitch is gone.

This was probably just a promo deal, but when the service launched, you could get mobile for $30/mo and home+mobile for about 50-60/mo "for life". The home+mobile is really just two lines of service.  There's no reason you couldn't have both lines acting as mobile. The current two-line plan adds a teaser rate, but drops the guaranteed pricing: "Pay only $30/month for the 1st two months, then $55/month thereafter." The single-line plan is even cheaper up front but winds up being more expensive long-term: "Pay only $15/month for the 1st two months, then $40/month thereafter."

They may be capping speeds.

It also looks like there *might* be speed caps now.  The old plan offered unlimited download speeds, which I read as meaning that the actual download speed of your connection was limited only by the WiMAX protocol's limits and that bandwidth that's provisioned to the towers.

The new mobile plan advertises "unlimited internet usage" and "download speeds up to 6.0 Mbps".  In reality, I never saw more than 6 megs down on the unlimited plan, but there is a difference between unlimited usage with a "speed limit" of 6.0 Mbps and uncapped, unlimited usage.  I can't tell if this was actually implemented as a technological "hard cap" or whether it's just a more accurate re-wording of their legalese.  

You can get contract-free pricing if you're careful.

Once you get to the sign-up link, you can choose a 2-year Agreement or Month-to-Month.  DO NOT CHOOSE THE AGREEMENT. The only benefit to the agreement is that you can add the equipment as a monthly leased expense. WIth month-to-month you have to pay for the equipment up front.  Still, the cost of leasing equipment almost never works out in the customer's favor.  Ever since the Carterfone decision, operators have been prohibited from requiring only their own equipment on telephone networks, and while I don't know if Clear's internet-only offering would be covered, it's a safe bet that you should pick up your own gear if you can. After all, you don't want to wind up paying $4,900 for use of rotary phone, do you?  Besides, you can get 4G USB adapters on Ebay for $10-$15.  Why pay monthly for cheap hardware?

You can get Clear service from your Cable Co.

Clear has agreements with Sprint, Time Warner, and Comcast.  These guys are just re-branding the Clear service, and selling it at a markup.  Time Warner calls theirs "Road Runner Mobile". I know Sprint holds an interest in Clear, and it's possible that TW and Comcast do as well.  Unless you prefer the convenience of consolidated billing, or just love cable company customer service, you can probably save some money buying directly from Clear.

LTE is coming, 4G+ is here.

With technology, there's always the "next greatest thing" right around the corner.  Heck, WiMAX deployments are still relatively cutting edge.  AT&T is still pushing 3G on the iPhones and iPad. (article on this to follow).  But, LTE is another kind of 4G technology that could offer a 2x to 10x improvement over WiMAX, depending upon how the carriers deploy it.  Verizon is pre-announcing LTE gear already.

And, Clear has implemented plans they're calling 4G+ that can fall back to 3G (on Sprint's EVDO network), but with limitations on speed and total transfer.  There's probably enough for a separate post just on LTE and WiMAX, and Clear has made some public statements about possibly moving to LTE when it's more broadly available.  So, this could get interesting. 

Would I recommend it?

Clear's service isn't flawless.  But it's good enough that I've switched to it full-time at home and keep a mobile USB adapter in my laptop bag.  I just called Time Warner and scheduled a disconnect.  Between free over-the-air HDTV and Clear's wireless internet, I can cut the cord.  If you're a speed junkie, you'll still get faster speeds on a wired cable modem.  If you use VOIP extensively and aren't in a strong coverage area, calls on Clear's network can be choppy.

I'm happy enough with it to run Clear as my only ISP.  But I'm also tolerant of bleeding-edge technology glitches and can troubleshoot most problems myself.  I think Clear is mostly there in terms of being ready for mainstream adoption.  As long as they can keep enough bandwidth to the towers and they don't over-subscribe users, I think they'll be fine.