The Compliance Radar · Issue #3

The Compliance Radar with Amber

September 2026·For HR & compliance teams

Amber MangerinoDirector of Partner Services, PSBIConnect on LinkedIn ↗

Amber Mangerino, PSBI Director of Partner Services

Amber's Take

I keep coming back to one question across every story in this issue: where are these employer standards actually documented, and who is checking that they are being followed?

A lot of companies are not lacking policy on paper. They are lacking a clear process and real accountability for it. Nobody wants to own the verification step, so the gap sits quietly until it becomes a lawsuit or a settlement that could have been avoided with one person actually responsible for the check.

This is not a problem HR alone can fix from the bottom up. Leadership needs to audit its own processes, find the gaps, and clean them up before a regulator or plaintiff’s attorney does.

Amber Mangerino signature

On the Radar

4/5

HR Anxiety Score

Address This Quarter

EEOC enforcement · physical testing · medical inquiry

EEOC Settlement Flags Premature Physical Testing and Medical-Inquiry Risk

EEOC enforcement release · August 21, 2026 · Read the source ↗

Piedmont Cheerwine agreed to pay $36,000 to resolve an EEOC disability-discrimination suit. The agency alleged that a pre-employment agility test and medical-inquiry process were used improperly and that a physician’s work-clearance note was rejected.

EEOC enforcement · physical testing · medical inquiry

Amber's Take

This employer overstepped in every way they could, and they're now facing the consequences of acting on assumptions instead of evidence. The questions I keep coming back to: where was HR when this agility test was requested? Where was the advocate making sure this employee's rights were actually protected in the moment, instead of after a lawsuit? And what is Cheerwine actually going to do to correct what was clearly a lapse in leadership's judgment, not just a paperwork gap?

It's also worth saying plainly: it's completely normal for an employee to want to comply with what their employer is asking, especially when there's no clear precedent telling them what their rights actually are in a moment like this. She wasn't combative, she wasn't difficult, she did every single thing that was asked of her, took the test, answered the questions, got the clearance, and she still ended up dismissed. That's what makes this so frustrating: compliance didn't protect her at all.

Here's the part that really gets me: this employee went to her own doctor, got an actual medical clearance in writing, and handed it over exactly the way she was supposed to. Cheerwine looked at it and threw it in the trash anyway, then fired her. That's not caution, that's a company that had already made up its mind and was just waiting for an excuse. A physician's clearance isn't a suggestion an employer gets to overrule on a whim, and ignoring one outright should be treated as the red flag it is, not a footnote in a settlement.

That's exactly where the documentation and ownership question matters most. Before any team requires a fitness-for-duty test, asks a health-related question, or overrides a treating physician's clearance, someone with actual authority, HR or legal, not just a manager acting on their own read of the situation, needs to sign off and document the specific, current, job-related reason for doing so. If Cheerwine had needed to put that reasoning in writing and get it reviewed before acting, this probably never gets to a lawsuit. The gap here wasn't a missing policy, it was nobody being positioned to catch the decision before it became a termination.

4/5

HR Anxiety Score

Address This Quarter

California · workplace AI · emerging law

California AB 1883 Would Restrict Workplace AI Emotion-Surveillance and Neural-Data Practices

California Legislature · August 31, 2026 · Read the source ↗

California’s Legislature passed AB 1883 and sent it to the Governor. The bill would restrict employer use of tools that infer an employee’s emotional state and collection of neural data. It is an emerging signal, not current law unless signed.

California · workplace AI · emerging law

Amber's Take

I don't think this is a bad idea, depending on the situation and industry, there's a real difference between a safety-critical fatigue monitor and a customer service tool scoring someone's "attitude." But I do think it's easy for data like this to get used in ways that go beyond its original, permissible purpose. This starts to feel like a "Big Brother" moment fast, and I think the harder question is where the line actually sits between reasonable monitoring and a true invasion of someone's privacy. My honest take: for most employers, outside of genuinely safety-driven use cases, this kind of monitoring risks doing more harm to the individual employee than it delivers in real business value.

Practically, California employers should be inventorying now, not waiting on the Governor's signature: any tool that analyzes facial expression, vocal tone, or biometric signals during calls, video interviews, or meetings; any wearable or headset marketed for fatigue, attention, or "engagement" tracking; and any vendor contract where "sentiment analysis" or "engagement scoring" is part of the pitch. What employers should avoid doing is treating this as settled law and ripping tools out today. AB 1883 is enrolled and sitting with the Governor, not signed, so until it's law, this belongs on the watch list, not in a client-facing compliance requirement.

4/5

HR Anxiety Score

Address This Quarter

Healthcare · credentialing · ongoing monitoring

CMS Provider-Integrity Action Reinforces Ongoing Healthcare Credentialing and Status Monitoring

CMS enforcement release · August 28, 2026 · Read the source ↗

CMS reported revoking 157 fraudulent laboratory providers and said analytics supported actions that prevented $1.6 billion in improper Medicare payments. The release is not a new screening mandate, but it underscores that provider and entity status can change after onboarding.

Healthcare · credentialing · ongoing monitoring

Amber's Take

Big round of applause for CMS on this one, ongoing monitoring is exactly what should be happening, and these numbers prove the point. But I think there's a cost to this kind of fraud that doesn't show up in the dollar figures: when billing for services never provided and up-coding become part of the industry's story, it chips away at public trust in a way that actually affects care-seeking behavior. I think situations like this contribute to people staying home and "toughing it out," or waiting to see how they feel in a few days, instead of trusting the system enough to seek professional help when they need it. That's a gross lack of integrity with a real human cost attached to it, not just a billing problem.

The practical question underneath all of it: where are the standards and follow-up after enrollment, and who actually owns that? My answer is that enrollment can't be a one-time gate, it has to be a recurring calendar item, not just a credentialing checkbox. The first control I'd put on the calendar is a recurring claims-pattern review tied to a named owner, not just a system flag that sits in a queue, because the labs in this release weren't caught at enrollment, they were caught because someone was actively watching billing behavior after the fact. If no one owns that watch on a recurring schedule, the gap between onboarding and the next real check is exactly where fraud like this lives.

The Watchlist

Watch signal

E-Verify Status Change Report

DHS has been steadily expanding what the report flags. This is a workflow signal to monitor—not a reason to overstate a changing guidance environment as settled policy.

What changed

Revoked work-authorization documents no longer trigger the usual alert, so employers have to actively pull the report themselves to catch them.

Why it matters

Miss one and keep someone working without authorization, and that creates real liability. Overcorrect, ask for extra documents, or treat affected employees differently, and that creates a separate discrimination exposure.

What to do now

Add the report to the operational checklist, assign a clear owner, and keep following official guidance as it shifts. For most employers, the immediate impact is another manual step—not a dramatically higher risk profile.

Amber’s note: worth keeping an eye on as the guidance changes.

One Question Amber's Getting

Amber Mangerino Director of Partner Services, PSBI

Each month I answer one question I’m hearing from HR and compliance teams—directly and practically.

Q: Who owns the verification step at your company—the actual person checking that a policy is followed, not just written down?

A: If you cannot answer that in one sentence, that is probably your next audit finding. The same gap keeps showing up: a handoff where ownership gets fuzzy and nobody documents the call.