topic: Employee benefits. During the month of January, total earnings and salaries were $50,000. January is the first month of the year, and so, employees haven't yet hit the annual taxable earnings ceiling of $113,000, which means that all wages and salaries paid this month will be subject to the full FICA tax percentage. When it comes to the federal unemployment tax amount, the same may be said. Every employer in the state is required to pay a 5.4% payroll tax on all salaries and earnings. A total of $7,000 was deducted from workers' paychecks during the month due to income taxes. Recording all earnings and salaries paid together with taxes, with regard to all wages and salary expenses for the month, would help document payment of wages and salaries and acceptance of all wages and salary expenses for the month. A significant number of businesses are concerned about growing health care prices, which forces them to look into possibilities to limit their expenditures when it comes to offering health insurance and other benefit packages. Publishing is as bad as you could have heard. When faced with this dilemma, Emile Troyer, the director of compensation and benefits, has to expand his responsibilities. The firm is doing well and continues to expand, but Emile understands that he is critical to ensuring the firm's profitability because of his ability to minimize expenditures while still offering superior benefits to suit employee requirements. Due to Emile's relentless pursuit of cost containment, significant changes have occurred over the previous few years. Once the corporation raised the employee health insurance contribution to the premium, it raised it again in the previous five years. As part of the negotiations to keep the health insurance, the corporation renegotiated its insurance plan, and with greater deductibles, total premium rates were cut. To be certain, Emile believes he has accomplished as much as feasible in terms of reducing the company's health-care insurance costs at this time. As he tries to cut expenses, he focuses on decreasing the number of work-related claims filed by workers. The goal of the project is to minimize the number of claims with the help of case managers who will work with workers who have chronic health conditions. While the population with chronic illness has seen a reduced number of claims after the implementation of this measure, only a tiny percentage of Reading Publishing's total workforce was impacted. Emile understands that an issue still exists, as he is looking at a claim usage data issued by the company's insurance, which indicates an above-average amount of claims. Even if the number of workers who have long-term medical issues is small, there are a large number of claims coming from the rest of the workforce. It is also possible that many of the accusations might be attributed to the company's staff members' bad conduct. He understands that staff at Reading Publishing are under a tremendous amount of stress. Many staff are always on the go, and editors have an overabundance of work to meet deadlines. Emile understands that there are many workers who smoke and that alcohol drinking is a part of the corporate culture in the sector. Finally, since their very demanding schedules provide few workers with the leisure to exercise or participate in other healthy activities, many workers are not in optimal health. The total expenses for health insurance are thought to be impacted by certain specific activities, as a result of which claims for insurance have likely been affected. Emile came to the conclusion that there may be some chance for improvement due to some of the statistics that measure staff usage and the understanding that human behavior is often predictable. Derek has a challenge: not just to combat health insurance expenses, but also with the overall prices of other perks. This includes controlling his workers' habits and developing inventive ideas for managing insurance costs and employee behavior. There are several examples of activities that Emile may do to help reduce the overall cost of Reading Publishing's health insurance