For those who think the chance of being assessed penalties for non-compliance with the Affordable Care Act are slim to none, think again.  The IRS’ efforts to enforce the ACA’s employer mandate are alive and kicking.  Since late November 2017, the IRS has been sending out proposed penalty notices to companies they believe were not compliant.  For now, the IRS is only assessing proposed penalties for the 2015 calendar year.  The notices are rolling out slowly, and the IRS has only mailed out a fraction of the total number of notices expected for 2015.  Moreover, the IRS has indicated they have enough information to start sending out similar notices for 2016.

Because of unfamiliarity with these notices, we are seeing a trend where companies fail to deal with the notice in a timely manner.  They don’t realize they generally only have 30 days from the date the notice was mailed to respond.  In addition, the notices may not even be addressed to the right person at the company.  Or the person receiving it may set it aside with the intention of figuring out how to deal with later.

This could be very costly for your company.

  • In every instance where Kean Miller has seen one of these notices, the estimated penalties have been grossly overestimated.   The reasons for this are varied.  The company may have filled out the informational forms incorrectly, which happens often because there is a lot of room for confusion and error in the IRS forms (e.g., incorrect or omitted indicator codes on the 1095 forms), or the employees themselves may have mistakenly provided incorrect information when applying for subsidized health care on the ACA marketplace website.
  • If your company receives one of these letters from the IRS and doesn’t dispute the penalty amount before the deadline you will have waived your rights to contest the amount.   There are no second chances.  Same can be said if you don’t timely exercise your appeal rights once you receive the IRS response to your protest.
  • If the company does not respond or appeal, the next thing they can expect from the IRS is a demand for payment letter.  The time to dispute the amount will be over, and the IRS will start collection proceedings for non-payment.

In short, the penalty notice letters are real, there is a deadline, and the IRS is (as always) serious.  Non-compliance with the ACA is a legal matter that demands prompt attention to ensure protection of your company’s rights.