单选题 A dependent audit comes from your employer, who wants proof that the people you"re carrying on the company health plan really are your dependents. If you can"t prove they are, the company will drop them. The goal is to ferret out children who are over age 18 and not in school, ex-spouses, sometimes even nieces or nephews—people, in short, who do not meet an employer"s definition of dependent. If your company does not already conduct these audits, chances are it eventually will. And while it may strike you as an annoyance, do not ignore this task. Otherwise, eligible dependents could lose their health coverage.
From an employer"s perspective, audits make good business sense. Health care costs have been rising by 5 to 10 percent a year for over a decade, and employers want to contain those costs. An audit of a 10,000-person employer will typically uncover 200 to 500 ineligible dependents, said John Fazio, a senior consultant with the employee benefits firm Towers Watson. Removing these people, who cost a company an average of $2,100 a head, translates into annual savings of $420,000 to $1.05 million a year for the employer.
Dependent audits have been around for more than a decade. But they have become popular in the last few years, as employers desperately sought ways to trim their health care budgets. This year 69 percent of large companies plan to conduct a dependent audit, up from the 55 percent that planned to do so in 2008, according to a March survey by Towers Watson and the National Business Group on Health, a nonprofit organization of large employers.
From the employees" perspective, such audits are at best an annoyance, forcing them to gather paper work proving, say, that a child who had been covered for years remains eligible. At worst, an audit can be a wrenching and costly experience when a worker"s dependent is found to be ineligible and has to get insurance elsewhere. What is more, a worker could be liable for the money that an employer paid out for a spouse or child who should not have been on the plan.
And, as audits have become more common, the process for employees has become more onerous. "It used to be the honor system," says Michael Smith, the chief executive of ConSova, a dependent auditing company. Just five years ago, employers typically asked that you sign an affidavit stating that your dependent was eligible to be on your plan. "Now, they want documentation," Mr. Fazio said. "It"s a more diligent process." That means you may have to dig up birth and marriage certificates, bank statements, divorce agreements and other documents that prove your child or spouse are legal dependents.

单选题 The goal of a dependent audit is for a company to ______.

单选题 More companies conduct dependent audits now because ______.

单选题 If a child is on an insurance plan but is found to be ineligible, ______.

单选题 The word "onerous" (first sentence, last paragraph) probably means ______.

单选题 The process of putting a dependent on an insurance plan used to be the honor system in that ______.