In the complex ecosystem of HR platforms, seamless coordination between employers, benefits providers, and third-party administrators like Justworks is pivotal. Errors during sensitive periods, such as COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) events, can shake employee confidence and potentially leave individuals without essential healthcare coverage. One such case involved synchronization issues when electing benefits through Justworks during COBRA qualifying events. However, proactive intervention via manual enrollment processes helped prevent what could have been serious coverage interruptions.
TLDR:
Justworks experienced a syncing issue where employee-elected benefits during COBRA events didn’t transfer correctly to insurance carriers. This glitch could have led to temporary loss of coverage. Manual enrollment fixes acted as a safety net, ensuring that affected employees remained insured. While it showcased the platform’s vulnerability, it also demonstrated the value of attentive HR teams and the importance of manual monitoring during automated processes.
Understanding COBRA and Why Accuracy is Critical
COBRA allows employees to maintain their group health coverage temporarily after leaving a job or experiencing other qualifying life events. Under federal regulation, employees typically have 60 days to decide whether to continue their coverage. This tight window, combined with the sheer complexity of coverage transitions, means everything must coordinate smoothly.
Platforms like Justworks are often used to streamline the administrative side of these transitions. They send election data to benefit providers, process payments, and ensure that coverage remains uninterrupted. However, because this process involves multiple systems and third-party integrations, the potential for technical disconnects is always present.
The Syncing Failure: What Went Wrong
In this reported case, the issue arose specifically during COBRA qualifying events where employees used Justworks to elect continued coverage. Despite elections being made within the platform before the deadline, that data failed to properly sync with the insurance carriers. As a result, no activation occurred at the benefit provider’s end.
This malfunction didn’t occur due to a user error—in most cases, the employees followed all required steps. Instead, the syncing failure stemmed from a backend API miscommunication between Justworks and certain carriers. Essentially, election data was “stuck” within the Justworks ecosystem and never reached its final destination where coverage would be turned on.
Because COBRA coverage requires timely elections and dependent enrollment, any interruption can leave employees feeling vulnerable. Pregnancies, unexpected hospital visits, and prescriptions all rely on the assurance of continued care. In this case, the coverage gap was not theoretical—it had the potential to impact people’s real-world medical access.
How Justworks Identified the Issue
Alerts began surfacing when affected individuals contacted carriers directly or sought confirmation of coverage and found no record of any continuation. Benefits administrators at several companies noticed trends in delayed activations and escalated the inquiries to Justworks support teams.
The Justworks internal systems showed elections were completed, but the carriers had no reflective data. After an internal audit, Justworks confirmed the failure was not isolated but had affected a broader group of COBRA electors within a specific date range.
The Importance of HR Alertness
HR departments play a pivotal role in catching discrepancies. In this event, the HR representatives went beyond passive management—they acted as investigators, runner-up processors, and often personal advocates for the affected employees. Their proactive stance helped bridge the gap that automation had created.
Signs that HR teams used to detect this problem included:
- Employees reporting out-of-pocket costs for procedures they believed were covered
- Insurance carriers showing no record of re-enrollment
- Discrepancies between the Justworks dashboard and carrier portals
Once a pattern was identified, these teams quickly escalated the issue through multiple channels. This cooperation between HR administrators and Justworks enabled a rapid diagnosis and ultimately a swift, although manual, solution.
The Manual Enrollment Fix
To prevent coverage gaps, Justworks implemented a temporary manual enrollment repair. Rather than relying purely on syncing data across systems, their support teams worked directly with carriers and employers to retroactively confirm elections and activate benefits. This “human patch” approach was effective but labor-intensive.
The repair process included:
- Compiling a report of all affected electors within a specific timeframe
- Direct outreach to each impacted insurance carrier with enrollment details
- Manual uploads of necessary documentation
- Backdating the policies to reflect continuous coverage from the chosen start date
It’s worth noting that in some instances, premium payments had already been accepted by Justworks. The lack of coverage wasn’t tied to payment processing, which made the issue even more complex from a user experience standpoint—employees felt they had done everything right, but still faced service denials at clinics and pharmacies.
The Human and Technical Outcomes
As a result of the manual intervention:
- All known affected users had their coverage retroactively reinstated.
- No employees were found to have suffered permanent coverage lapses.
- Justworks committed to strengthening safeguards around election syncing during COBRA events.
The company also introduced proactive monitoring scripts to detect anomalies in real-time and flag any similar data transmission issues promptly. They’ve reportedly re-evaluated some aspects of their data pipeline, particularly the hand-off logic between platforms and carriers.
Lessons Learned for Employers and HR Teams
This scenario serves as a critical case study in the limits of automation and the need for human oversight in benefits administration. While HR tech platforms bring considerable ease, they must be curated with vigilance.
For businesses using services like Justworks, the event underscores several best practices:
- Regularly verify: Encourage HR teams to double-check with carriers after COBRA elections are submitted.
- Educate employees: Teach exiting team members how to verify their own enrollment independently from the platform.
- Create fallback policies: Develop a process for what to do when a system failure displaces coverage, including direct carrier support and temporary reimbursements if applicable.
- Foster strong relationships with your PEO’s support team: Ensure your HR department has escalation paths already in place.
Looking Ahead: Can We Trust Automation Alone?
Automation promises much, especially when dealing with bureaucratic systems like benefits enrollment and COBRA compliance. However, no amount of coding can replace the vigilance of a well-trained human eye. This event demonstrated how even mature platforms can falter and emphasized the continuing need for adaptability, speed, and old-fashioned human persistence.
While it’s likely that Justworks and others in the HR tech space will refine their systems to prevent future errors, the role of HR professionals remains indispensable. Technology may drive the process, but people ensure its integrity.