If the current Affordable Care Act employer coverage reportingrules stay in place, the Internal Revenue Service has to dosomething to ease employers' desperation over getting accurateSocial Security numbers for the employees' spouses, children andother dependents.

The Information Reporting Program Advisory Committee (IRPAC), apanel that gives members of the public a chance to review IRSprocedures, gave the IRS that advice in a new report on 2017 taxadministration concerns.

The Affordable Care Act imposed employer health coveragereporting requirements by adding Section 6055 and Section 6056 tothe Internal Revenue Code (IRC). The watchdog agency sees delays inefforts to set up 1095-C compliance systems.

To comply with IRC Section 6055 and IRC Section 6056, employersbig enough to count as “applicable large employers” under federalrules must send out waves of 1095-B tax forms or 1095-C tax formsto employees to document whether the employees and their dependentswere offered what the government defines as “minimum essentialcoverage.” Employers also must send related 1094-B or 1094-C healthcoverage offer summary forms to the IRS.

To complete the 1095 series forms, an employer needs the fullnames and Social Security numbers of employees and theirdependents, IRPAC says.

Many employers have trouble getting the coverage informationtogether in time to meet the current IRS reporting headlines, inpart because employee decisions made as late as February can affectthe coverage reporting for the prior calendar year, IRPAC says.

Getting accurate dependent Social Security numbers, and makingsure that employees are giving dependent names in a way that'sconsistent with the information in IRS data-matchingsystems, can also be extremely difficult, and it appears thatscreening for health coverage form data conflicts is tougher thanthe screening for conflicts on ordinary W-2 wage reporting forms,IRPAC says.

In the past, the IRS has helped employers by extending thefiling deadline for the health coverage offer reports and saying itwill go easy on employers as long as they appear to be making goodfaith efforts to comply with the reporting rules.

“In the absence of another universal extension to the furnishingdeadline, the IRS should be expect to be inundated with requestsfor extensions,” IRPAC says.

The IRS should continue to extend the filing deadlines and goeasy on employers that have problems getting their filings throughthe Social Security number matching system, IRPAC says.

The Trump administration has encouraged federal agenciesto ease up on many types of Affordable Care Act complianceefforts, but the Affordable Care Act employer reportingrequirements are still on the books. Some of the major Republicanand bipartisan proposals for changing the law would eliminate theemployer mandate, but it's not certain whether any of the proposalswould change the employer coverage reporting requirements.

From: ThinkAdvisor