It’s a fact. It is time to start thinking about reporting requirements for the ACA for your 2015 information. So what do you need to know?
- You may be a “large employer” for ACA purposes even if you don’t have 50 full time employees. A full-time employee is considered someone who averages 30 hours per week. The IRS looks at your prior year employee count and looks at full-time equivalents. That means that having 100 part time employees working an average of 15 hours per week is the same as having 50 full-time employees.
- If you have multiple entities with the same ownership, they must be combined for purposes of the ACA. So having one company with 30 employees and another company with 20 employees means the combined organization is a “large employer.”
- Just providing insurance is not enough. You will have new reporting requirements for 2015 data due in 2016: the 1095-C and the 1094-C. Information needed for these forms include:
- Who is a full-time employee for each month,
- Name and address for each employee,
- Information about health coverage offered by month,
- The employee’s share of the monthly premium for lowest-cost self-only minimum value coverage,
- Months the employee was enrolled in your coverage,
- Months the employer met an affordability safe harbor with respect to an employee and whether other relief applies for an employee for each month
- If you offer a self-insured plan, information about the covered individuals enrolled in the plan, by month.
- Information about whether you offered coverage to 70% of your full-time employees and their dependents in 2015 (95% for years after 2015)
- Total number of Forms 1095-C you issued to employees
- Full time employee counts by month,
- Total employee counts by month,
- Whether you are eligible for certain transition relief as an employer.
- If you are hoping that your broker can prepare these forms for you, it is pretty obvious that you will still have to provide a lot of information.
- Trying to come up with all of this information at year end is obviously not the best approach. It would be like trying to piece together W-2 forms working from copies of pay stubs.
Stay up-to-date with what is required and how you can deal with the administrivia. Check out http://SageCanHelp.com
