When federal lawmakers return to Capitol Hill next week, we hope they take quick action on several key employee benefit and risk management issues. On the employee benefits side, it is time that legislators address widely identified problems with the health care reform law.

The biggest one is the 40% excise tax on the portion of group health insurance premiums that exceed, starting in 2018, $10,200 for single coverage and $27,500 for family coverage.

As we have written before, the underlying assumption that drove lawmakers to include the tax as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has no basis.

That assumption — that employers would cut benefits to stay under the excise tax trigger and instead increase employees' taxable salaries, boosting federal revenues by billions of dollars, to partially offset those cuts — is nonsense. There is not a shred of evidence supporting that assumption.

What is known is the excise tax is wholly unfair. Two employers could offer identical health care plans, with one triggering the excise tax and the other not. The reason: One employer is located in a part of the country where health care costs are much higher than average, while the other is located in an area with below-average costs.

Also ripe for congressional action is an ACA provision that requires employers to offer — to avoid a hefty federal fine — coverage to their full-time employees, defined as those working an average of 30 hours a week. Whoever heard of full-time being defined that way? At a minimum, the definition of a full-time employee should be bumped up to those working an average of at least 35 hours a week.

And much needs to be done on the health care reform law regulatory side as well. For example, rules that will require employers to report health care plan enrollment information are immensely complicated and need to be simplified.

On the risk management side, a piece of unfinished business lawmakers should address is the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which would bolster sharing information about cyber threats. The Senate was supposed to move on the measure before its latest recess, but didn't because of some lawmakers' concerns about privacy protections. We hope those concerns can be allayed through amendments, if necessary, so legislation to provide new defenses against almost-daily cyber attacks gets final approval.