Does anyone have any good advice on third party COBRA Administration vendors? We currently have ADP and they flat out suck. I spend more time administering and answering questions from terminated employees because ADP can't help them.

We are a small company, less than 150 employees.

Thanks!

Why do you want to outsource it when you are so small? Do you have a lot of turnover? Do you have many people currently on COBRA? We have 350 employees and we just do it in house. With the money you are spending on outsourcing, you could afford to go to a good seminar, or buy a good manual (EBIA) and just do it yourself.

I've had up to 500 employees and have always administered it myself. I never even bought a manual.

I looked up the Cobra Laws online and created documentation and forms to send to my terminated employees.

Created Excel spreadsheets to track mailings and payments, while using my Outlook Task Manager to remind me of date/deadlines and payments due, etc.

Some sites even had forms already available for free downloads.

I don't trust outsourcing for this and to be very honest, a lot of terminated employees don't sign up for Cobra because of cost, therefore there's not a whole lot to do, outside of sending initial notifications.

Is there anyone who uses a TPA that has some suggestions? Or even an inhouse COBRA system that works well?

Our COBRA administration is nice simply because it is bundled with our medical provider. We enter the employees that elect benefits into their website and when they term we enter that and the medical provider handles the mailings and the payments. It's a bit too easy.

We're a company of 125 employees.

When I did benefits admin, I had ADP HR Profile. I was able to set up non-payroll companies and enter info on "employees" . I set up a COBRA company and was able to track my beneficiaries there and use Reportsmith to report on them.

We used a provider out of Wisconsin -- TASC or CobraToday. They were amazing. I highly recommend them. It was about $400 per year...well worth it.

Now we are using a local provider through our benefits broker and they are ok, but I wouldn't recommend them. I end up doing more admin then I would like to keep them updated. But they did do a good job with the COBRA ARRA changes. Sometimes I do think it would just be easier to bring it in-house, but that would mean doing all the initial setup of documentation and systems. Just not worth it right now since we pay less than $100 a year.

We are a smaller company as well - just under 300 employees. We currently use Acclaim Benefits out of Minneapolis and their COBRA administration has been great, especially their help in explaining and changing processes for the recent subsidy.

Not sure how much we spend a year on them, however; I believe we pay per service.

A few companies ago, I used CobraServ, and they were cheap, efficient, and hit all the basics- initial notices, QE notices, continuation enrollments, payments, etc. They've since been bought out by Ceridian, so I can't speak to the service today, but they might be worth a look.