IRS Says, Boom!

Forgot about this from the PPACA seminar I attended last week:

Apparently all groups with <50 EE's will no longer get composite rates, at least in IL.
 
Forgot about this from the PPACA seminar I attended last week:

Apparently all groups with <50 EE's will no longer get composite rates, at least in IL.

Oh, that should be fun. Can you imagine the payroll hassle for a 35 life group to do step-rates?

Come to think of it, this will mean that younger people are more likely to be within the 9.5% affordability rule, and older people are not. Hmmmm.... I wonder how that will affect an employer's choice of whether or not to set dynamite to the health plan and send employees out to shop on their own.
 
Oh, that should be fun. Can you imagine the payroll hassle for a 35 life group to do step-rates?

Come to think of it, this will mean that younger people are more likely to be within the 9.5% affordability rule, and older people are not. Hmmmm.... I wonder how that will affect an employer's choice of whether or not to set dynamite to the health plan and send employees out to shop on their own.

That's the main reason why - to have a better change at rates being considered "affordable."
 
By the time the population and DC realizes there is nothing affordable about this piece of crap legislation the only thing left is to trash it and start over.

Of course that will never happen.
 
Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Today the IRS issued the FINAL Rule regarding the "Shared Responsibility Payment", aka The Penalty-Tax levied against taxpayers who do not buy/own minimum essential health insurance in 2014.

I normally do not read these rules carefully cause they give me a headache. But, this time I glanced at page 2 and saw some really wild numbers...

--A 7.5 MILLION hour reporting "burden". At least they used the right word!

--An estimated 36 million individual taxpayers will pay the penalty-tax.

--On average, it will take each taxpayer 21 minutes to calculate his penalty-tax, because there might be more than one person on the tax return that doesn't have minimum essential coverage. The penalty is calculated for each person, even though 1% of 2014 income will probably trump the aggregate of individual penalties.

Here's the Rule document: https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2013-21157.pdf

Maybe someone who has the interest can look over this 75 document and share any last minute surprises inserted by our beloved Eternal Revenue Service.
-ac
 
Last edited:
A little help in reading those regulations...

They come in 3 parts - we are going to tell you this, we are now telling you this, here is what we just told you.

That's why they seem redundant.

The first part is a summary, and it is supposed to be written in plain English. It tells you what is going to be discussed in the document, and pretty much explains the reason why the issue(s) are important.

The 2nd part is the meat of the document, in pretty well readable format. If it is a final rule, it often tells you what happened in the proposed rules and tells you if they changed their mind or stayed with their position in the proposed rule. Whether proposed or final, every paragraph/issue will probably start with something like "commenters said...", so you have some idea why the public thought their rule was, well, not brilliant.

The 3rd part is legalese. That's where they insert legal language into the code, based on what they just said in the 2nd section. Also, here is where they are required to talk about paperwork reduction acts, how many hours it should take to comply, or to appeal your penalty, and how much you might need to pay people to help you comply or appeal. Yeah. Funny stuff.

Oh, and in case you ever see the documents in this readable "article style" format with page numbers, then see it in a 3-column eye-straining document without page numbers --- they are the same thing. The 3-column one is the official one from the Office of the Federal Register (OFR), and the article-style one was pre-released before OFR published it. But they are the same.

So, like my friends in government, I just told you what I was going to tell you, then told you, then told you in more legal language. Triple talk from the redundancy department.
 
A little help in reading those regulations...

They come in 3 parts - we are going to tell you this, we are now telling you this, here is what we just told you.

So, like my friends in government, I just told you what I was going to tell you, then told you, then told you in more legal language. Triple talk from the redundancy department.

TRIPLE TALK. That has a nice ring to it and explains why it's hard to argue against the IRS. Their rules leave no ambiguity. But HHS must be less skilled because "rule commenters" frequently term HHS's language as "ambiguous".

Thanks for that quick Rule-Reading101 session Ann!
-allen
 
Back
Top