Regulations put in place by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to address employer wellness programs under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act will be vacated on January 1, 2019.

HRDive reports that the regulations had already been determined by a federal judge not to be properly justified. However, citing the potential for “disruptive consequences” to employers, who need at least six months to design new programs, he opted not to vacate the rules immediately, instead telling the EEOC to come up with new rules.

A new draft, according to the EEOC, will be available in August of 2018; final rules will likely take untill October of 2019. The regulations, says HRDive, were an attempt to clarify the requirement that wellness programs be “voluntary”—in other words, at which specific point a financial incentive to participate makes a program involuntary instead of actually allowing would-be participants a true choice of whether to participate.

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