New ACA Employer Requirements Continue to Roll In

Most employers with 50 or more full-time employees were supposed to offer full-time employees affordable major medical coverage, or else face the possibility of having to pay penalties if some employees end up qualifying for ACA exchange plan premium subsidies.

Members of the House passed an Affordable Care Act change bill, the American Health Care Act, by a 217-213 vote May 4. The Senate is now considering the legislation and may draft an alternative. The House bill does not appear to include any provisions that would affect the current ACA employer coverage reporting requirements.

Out in the field, Tacchino has not noticed any significant changes in how the Internal Revenue Services is approaching ACA compliance efforts aimed at employers. 

"When [we're] speaking with the IRS regarding employer reporting and electronic filing, they still are maintaining that ACA is the law and that they are going to continue to support it until a new law takes effect, if at all," Tacchino said.

Tacchino said he does believe the IRS will probably go easy on enforcing compliance with the ACA individual shared responsibility provision, which requires many individuals to own what the government classifies as solid coverage, or minimum essential coverage, or else pay a penalty.

"A couple of months ago, the IRS said that they would accept tax file returns for individuals and families without health care information," Tacchino said. "This would be critical information for the IRS to enforce and impose penalties under the ACA's individual mandate. So, clearly, they will not be putting an emphasis on enforcing that."

EEO-1

In addition to helping employer clients with ACA compliance, SyncStream has also been helping clients with another, less-publicized new information reporting requirement: the Employer Information Report EEO-1.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission developed the EEO-1 Survey to gather basic information about employers that it can use in compliance activities. The EEOC is requiring most private employers with 100 or more employees, and smaller employers that are members of corporate groups with 100 or more employees, to file an EEO-1 report.

The employers subject to the EEO-1 survey participation requirement have to give the EEOC information their workforce demographics, including pay ranges and hours worked, broken down by job category, worker ethnicity and worker gender, Tacchino said.

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