labor lawAdivision of labor law center

In Arkansas, the change in the federal law in the 1990s also affected the labor law on hiring and reporting new employees as well. So employers in Arkansas, you also have to be up on all of your new hire forms, such as applications, reference check forms, payroll deduction forms, drug testing forms, and anything else that your human resource department might have new hired fill out and sign.

The reason is that the new hire reporting labor law in the state requires employers to provide a good bit of information on their new hires. You have to have handy such information as your federal employer identification number, or FEIN—which you don’t need to get from your new employees, obviously.

But you also need to know the employee’s social security number, their full name (first, middle and last), along with the first date of their hire, their date of birth, and their official state of hire. That last bit of information is important if you’re operating a multistate company and plan to have the employee working in more than one office in more than one state.

In Arkansas, the labor law for new hire reporting has entered the 21st century, allowing employers to file some of this information on new hires by the Internet, or by other electronic reporting methods such as faxes. Otherwise, employers can go the surefire old way of mailing in the new hire report to the state.

However you report your new hires, the labor law in Arkansas follows the basic federal guidelines and requires the info to be sent in no later than 20 days after the hiring. As with some other states, Arkansas offers a slightly different time frame if you do it electronically. Then, you can report your new hires in batches, twice a month, with no more than 16 days between the batches.

There are many important parts to government that we all do not know too much about, even if we really should. One of those areas has to do with the Arkansas (AR) Department of Human Resources. This department is one that offers many different benefits and is likely to provide all of us with some type of resource to use. In many ways, if you are an employer, you will work with this agency closely. If you are an employee, you too will be affected by what the department does and does not do. Therefore, it is an important department but also a tool to aid in the well being of those in the work place.

The most common reason to turn to the Arkansas (AR) Department of Human Resources is for that of unemployment. Often, if something happens and you find yourself out of work, this will be the place that you visit first. Granted, they do provide for unemployment benefits and insurance needs, yet they do more as well. They provide several services to aid an individual into getting back into the work place with such things as job placement and job boards as well as education and training through a number of different programs. This includes such things as the Dislocated Worker Program, the Family Literacy Program, Older Worker Program and Youth Opportunity programs that can provide quite a bit of help.

In addition to these aspects, those that contact this board as business owners can learn about the laws that govern businesses and employee rights including safety and minimum wage information. In Arkansas, the minimum wage is that of $5.15 but, this is being heavily departed throughout Congress and could mean a bit of a strain on some businesses within the state. To learn what is happening, the Arkansas Department of Human Resources can provide the necessary information to those that need it.