The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), as recently amended (as the "ADA Amendments Act of 2008"), effective January 1, 2009, to expand the term "disability" and significantly increase the number of persons protected by the ADAAA.

To be protected under the ADAAA, a person has to be an individual with a disability who can perform essential job functions, with or without reasonable accommodations. The ADAAA significantly expands the definition of "disability" in four (4) ways:

• Directing that a person's impairment must be considered without corrective measures ("the ameliorative effects of mitigating measures"), except for ordinary eye glasses and contact lenses.
• Including in the definition of a disability those impairments that are episodic or in remission. These conditions will be covered by the ADAAA for their lifetime, even if their disease never becomes active again.
• Expanding the definition of major life activities, to add "eating, sleeping, walking, standing, lifting, bending, reading, concentrating, thinking, and communicating" as well as bodily functions.
• Directing the EEOC to adopt a broader interpretation of "substantially limits" as being "significantly restricted".

There are several new provisions to the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) which could result in additional administrative burden to employers First, is the ability for an employee to support a request for leave to care for a covered service member with a serious injury or illness. Since there is a "single 12-month period" for military caregiver leave to begin, the employee could have two leave years running under this new rule.

Second, there are new medical certification rules, as highlighted below

• Employers now must designate leave as FMLA within five business days of the employee notifying the employer of the need for FMLA leave, rather than two days.
• Employers also can require employees to follow their notice call-in procedures.
• HR professionals may contact an employee's health care provider to authenticate or clarify a medical certification, if the employee is first given the opportunity to cure any deficiencies in the certification.

ARRA imposes significant new Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy and security requirements on health plans, business associates and other vendors of personal health records.

There are several areas that are addressed by the new requirements:

• Extension of HIPPA for business associates
• Breach notification
• Accounting for disclosures
• Remuneration for exchange of PHI (Protected Health Information)
• Right to restrict disclosures
• Enforcement

Employers are no longer allowed to accept outdated forms of identification from employees. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) wants to "ensure that documents presented for use in the Form I-9 process must be valid and reliably establish both identity and employment authorization," This change takes into account the limits placed by their issuing authorities. If a document does not contain an expiration date, such as a Social Security card, it is considered unexpired."

The new Form I-9 also:

• Eliminates List A identity and employment authorization documentation Forms I-688, I-688A and I-688B (temporary resident cards and outdated employment authorization cards).
• Adds foreign passports containing certain machine-readable immigrant visas to List A.
• Adds to List A as evidence of identity and employment authorization valid passports for citizens of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), along with Form I-94 or Form I-94A indicating nonimmigrant admission under the Compact of Free Association Between the United States and the FSM or RMI.
• Makes technical updates.