Mystified By Affordable Care Act Reporting? We Can Help
There has been talk about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for years. Now it’s time for employers affected by the health law to comply with its IRS reporting requirements. The data needed for ACA compliance must be captured continuously and then reported annually in monthly breakdowns. To stay on top of the data processing needed for ACA reporting, many businesses are adding headcount to their accounting teams. However, adding a robust ACA Compliance Solution that works with your payroll or enterprise resource planning (ERP) system may be a more prudent investment.
Maintaining compliance with what is needed for ACA reporting to the IRS involves a review of every employee’s eligibility for health insurance coverage, testing for the affordability of that coverage, and documenting detailed breakdowns of the related payroll and benefits data to your eligible employees and the IRS.
Instead of processing all this data by hand, deploy the Integrity Data ACA Compliance Solution, which is a simple, cost-effective tracking and reporting engine that accepts the needed data from any payroll system or ERP system. This solution efficiently streamlines reporting efforts and reduces the risk of costly penalties. Here’s how it works:
- IRS forms: Employers are required to prepare Form 1095-C for employees and use Form 1094-C to submit information to the IRS. As your employee headcount grows, it can be difficult to capture required data and complete the required ACA forms by hand. The ACA Compliance Solution can automatically populate these forms. You can then print or email them to employees and submit them to the IRS.
- Employee eligibility: Companies need to track every employee’s service hours and be particularly watchful about variable-hour and part-time employees. If those employees reach full-time status, they become eligible for healthcare and must be offered coverage in time for their employer to avoid a penalty. The ACA Compliance Solution can forecast which employees are trending toward full-time status.
- Affordability: The health plans offered to employees must meet the ACA definition of affordability. You can use the ACA Compliance Solution to calculate employee contributions using the three allowed safe harbor calculations.
The volume of data needed to maintain ACA compliance is far too great to manage by hand or in elaborate spreadsheets, no matter how many people you hire for this job. In addition, the penalties are too expensive to risk making mistakes. Contact Integrity Data for more information about using the ACA Compliance Solution to gain the control and insight you need to maintain compliance without increasing the size of your accounting and human resources departments.
By Integrity Data, Illinois software company developing enhancements for Payroll and HR
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