The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) mandate for employers to provide employees health care or pay a penalty takes effect Jan. 1, 2014, and many businesses aren’t sure how to prepare.
“We regularly talk with people in various industries about what is important to them. For the past six months, every person from every industry has mentioned the employer mandate. There’s a lot of uncertainty,” says Joseph R. Popp, JD, LLM, tax supervisor at Rea & Associates.
Smart Business spoke with Popp about the employer mandate and steps business can take now to be ready for 2014.
What do employers need to do first?
The first step is to determine if you’re considered a large employer. The test is whether you have 50 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees; if not, the employer mandate does not apply to you. This will be easy to answer for many businesses. However, for some it will be difficult to calculate. Employers will have to add up their full-time workers, which are those who work 130 total hours a month or more, and all the part-time people. Part-time employees must be converted to FTEs by adding up the total hours they worked that month and dividing by 120. When that figure is added to your number of full-time workers, you have your monthly FTE count. Businesses with 40 to 60 FTEs may want to look at how they can stay or get under 50, and they may need to pull in various professionals to help them with that planning.
If they are deemed a large employer, what’s next?
Determine which employees may pose a risk for penalties based on your current situation if you were to make no changes. To do so, you need to look at a number of factors on a case-by-case basis.
One factor is whether the coverage provided by the employer is considered affordable. If an employee’s income is between 133 and 400 percent of the federal poverty level based on family size, you have to provide him or her with affordable coverage. Affordability is based on a sliding scale that starts at 3 percent and goes to 9.5 percent of gross income. There are a number of safe harbors that the IRS has provided to calculate if your coverage is considered affordable to a particular employee.
There’s also the coverage test, which is not concerned with premiums but instead an employee’s actual out-of-pocket medical costs. The minimum standard is 60 percent of medical costs paid by the plan — the new bronze-metal tier plan. If you have a plan with a high deductible, this along with other plan features may disqualify it from being considered adequate coverage. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has released a calculator that allows you to enter details of your plan and it will calculate its value in percentage terms. That will work for most plans. If it doesn’t, you’ll need to have an actuary calculate that value.
What are the penalties for not providing affordable or adequate coverage?
If you provide coverage to 95 percent of full-time workers, but it fails one of those tests for some employees, the penalty is $250 per month per full-time employee or $3,000 annually. If you don’t provide adequate coverage to 95 percent of full-time workers, the penalty is $166 per month per full-time employee, or $2,000 annually. On this $166 penalty, you’re not penalized for the first 30 employees each month.
Based on analysis we’ve done for companies, in most cases the least expensive option as an employer/employee group is for the employer to enhance health insurance payments to correct affordability and adequacy test failures. But that’s the most expensive option for employers.
Many employers will most likely make some plan changes so coverage is more affordable to the employee group as a whole, and then pay penalties on the outlying employees. In many cases, paying those annual penalty amounts for some employees will be cheaper than implementing a 100 percent compliance plan. Early planning will give businesses adequate time to build the best course of action.
Joseph R. Popp, JD, LLM, is a tax supervisor at Rea & Associates. Reach him at (614) 923-6577 or [email protected].
Webinar: Our free webinar, ‘Bracing for Impact: What You Need To Know About Health Care Reform,’ offers more on this topic.
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