The percentage of Spokane-area companies that offer employee benefits is higher than the comparable figure for the corporate sector statewide, says a report released by the Washington state Employment Security Department earlier this year.


The report says that only King County has a higher percentage of companies that offer health insurance, retirement plans, and various types of paid leave. All of the Spokane-area percentages for those benefits are higher than comparable figures for the state as a whole.


That speaks well for Spokane, says Mark Newbold, a partner in Moloney+ONeill Benefits, of Spokane. Employers here have a biding commitment to try to offer some type of benefits.


Rick Lockhart, an Olympia, Wash.-based project manager for the Employment Security Department who oversaw the study, says the department sent the survey to for-profit companies that have two or more employees and are in the states unemployment-insurance program. It didnt survey nonprofit or government employers.


The state sent surveys to about 17,200 companies statewide and received responses from about 9,800, or 57 percent, of them, Lockhart says. Of the respondents, 724 are based in Spokane County. The margin for error was plus or minus 1 percent.


In the Spokane area, 70 percent of the companies contacted in the survey offer health insurance to their full-time employees, and 17 percent make insurance available to part-time workers.


Statewide, 62 percent of companies surveyed offer health insurance to full-time employees, and 12 percent provide it to part-time workers.


Large employers are more likely than small ones to offer health insurance. Fifty-four percent of companies with two to nine employees offer it and 86 percent of all full-time workers have it.


In the Spokane area, 55 percent of employers provide health insurance for dependents of full-time employees, while 14 percent offer such benefits to dependents of part-time workers.


Of the companies surveyed statewide, 48 percent offer health insurance to dependents of full-time workers, and 9 percent make it available to the families of part-time workers, the study says.


Jim DeWalt, CEO and president of Associated Industries of the Inland Northwest, says the percentage of companies that offer health insurance is consistent with statistics he has seen from other sources. Generally speaking, though, the quality of those benefits has deteriorated in recent years, DeWalt says.


More and more companies are being squeezed by escalating costs, he says. The term we hear about is cost shifting, which is a move by employers to require employees to pay a greater share of their health-care premiums.


The survey didnt delve into how much of the cost burden for benefits falls onto employees or into how many workers opt to participate in such benefit plans.


Fewer companies offer a retirement benefit than health insurance, and that result surprised the states Lockhart.


It can be almost no cost to offer it, so thats surprisingly low, he says.


In Spokane County, 51 percent of the companies surveyed offer some sort of retirement plan to full-time employees, and 22 percent provide such a benefit to part-timers.


Of the employers that offer retirement benefits, about three-quarters provide defined-contribution plans, which involve a broad range of plans in which each employee has an individual account. Such plans include 401(k)s, profit sharing, and stock-bonus plans, among others. Just under 20 percent of employers here have defined-benefit plans, or pensions, through which employers guarantee to employees a certain monetary benefit during their retirement years.


Some 21 percent of Spokane-area companies contacted in the survey offer other retirement benefits that didnt fall into either category.


Statewide, about 40 percent of the companies surveyed offer retirement benefits to full-time workers, and 16 percent provide such plans for part-time employees. As in the Spokane area, three-quarters of the surveyed employers that offer retirement plans statewide have defined-contribution programs, and about 20 percent have defined-benefit plans.


Moloney+ONeills Newbold expects the number of companies that provide retirement benefits to grow in coming years.


We still have a ways to go to get all private-sector employees proper access to a tax-qualified retirement plan, he says. With the advent of the simple IRA and safe harbor 401(k) plans, more employers should be starting or enhancing retirement plans.


Employers with fewer than 100 employees can offer their employees simple IRAs, which require less administrative paperwork than other types of IRAs. Safe harbor 401(k) plans are similar to conventional 401(k)s, but dont carry some of the same regulatory criteria.


Lockhart says that while the percentage of businesses statewide offering retirement plans is low, the number of companies that offer defined-benefit programs is higher than he would have anticipated.


Its largely believed that those are becoming nonexistent, Lockhart says. He says the unexpectedly high number of them make him wonder, Are those employers offering those and phasing them out, or is that a legitimate benefit?


In the paid-leave category, almost 80 percent of the Spokane-area companies surveyed offer vacation leave to full-time employees, and three-quarters offer paid holidays. Those percentages drop to 29 percent and 19 percent, respectively, for part-timers.


Half of the companies surveyed here offered paid sick leave to full-time employees, and 23 percent of the employers here offer what the state refers to as undesignated leave, which covers all paid time off through accrual programs, such as time banks and paid time-off accounts.


For part-time workers, 14 percent have paid sick leave, and 10 percent have undesignated leave.


Statewide, 71 percent of employers offer paid vacation to full-time employees, and two-thirds offer paid holidays. Forty-four percent have a paid sick-leave program, and 20 percent have undesignated-leave programs.


The employee benefits survey is the second that the Employment Security Department has completed using the current methodology, Lockhart says. The most recent survey closely mirrored the previous years results, so no clear trends have developed yet on whether the number of companies that offer benefits is increasing or decreasing.


Contact Linn Parish at (509) 344-1266 or via e-mail at linnp@spokanejournal.com.