Employers subject to the employer shared responsibility provision under section 4980H of the Affordable Care Act are required to provide full time employees and the IRS with year-end reports regarding Employer-Provided Health Insurance Offer and Coverage for 2015.  As with many aspects of the ACA, the rules regarding this reporting are complex and can be confusing.

To assist you, MSC and our third-party administrator PAI have prepared a helpful bulletin summarizing requirements and providing you with other helpful links.  Click here to review that bulletin. 

PAI will begin providing the year-end information that you need to file your IRS 1094 and 1095 reports in December 2015 and early 2016.  This information will be delivered via the secure FTP folder directory provided to you, and an email notice will also be sent alerting you when the information has been posted.

We also understand that many software providers to the industry are enhancing system capabilities to assist in preparing these reports.  Several MSC strategic partners are developing processes enabling you to upload information into their system to automate reporting and generate the required IRS forms 1094 and 1095.  You can check with your software provider to learn what measures they are taking in this regard.

For much more detail on Forms 1094 and 1095, the IRS also provides this helpful link.  Be sure to check it out if you have additional information requirements.

Please let us know if you have questions, and as always thank you for your business.

MSC Tip of the Month

Making the strategic decision to change your firm’s payroll vendor is never easy.  But once you do select a new provider, one simple email or phone call can save you weeks or even months of headaches and re-work.

To quote Ben Franklin, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”  Because MSC’s health and benefit plan administration is intricately tied to your firm’s payroll information, be sure to alert your MSC representative in advance of the new vendor’s full implementation of the system. 

By doing so, MSC can make sure that the systems are integrated and mapped appropriately for reporting and withholding purposes from the outset — rather than going back after the fact and incurring weeks of re-work and often significant cost in “curing” two systems that are not interfacing properly.

One call is all that it takes to avoid the problem!