Early Internal Revenue Service (IRS) numbers for the latest tax season support the idea that public health insurance exchange users may be having trouble with filing returns.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), an agency that keeps tabs on the IRS, has posted data showing that, as of March 6, the IRS had received 66.7 million individual returns, and about 737,000 returns with information about use of exchange premium tax credits.
In a normal year, the IRS gets about 150 million individual and family tax returns.
Figures from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and other sources indicated that the exchange system may have received plan selection information for more than 8 million people throughout the year, that about 7 million people may have paid for coverage, and that about 5 million to 6 million people may have used the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) premium tax credit to pay for coverage.
If households receiving a premium tax credit had an average of 1.5 to 2 members per household, there may be a total of about 2.5 million to 4 million households that received premium tax returns at some point in 2014.