Despite the back and forth in Washington, D.C. about whether or not the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will be repealed and replaced by the American Health Care Act (ACHA), employer compliance and reporting requirements are still the law of the land and are not likely to be repealed or replaced for 2017 ACA reporting.
Accuracy Matters
For the here and now of ACA, what an employer should seek to achieve is the highest possible accuracy rate of its processes. Pre-validation measures are absolutely necessary to control errors, which can only be achieved through solid data.
Challenges to Accuracy
Some of the challenges to setting up accurate reporting for IRS hover around the basic understanding of what is compliance. This includes:
- Understanding offers of coverage made to employees, and
- Making sure offers were affordable for the employee; as well as,
- Separating offers made to different employee groups, and
- Non-calendar year insurance plan reviews for accurate monthly data.
Do’s and Don’ts for Data Accuracy
You have heard of “garbage in, garbage out.” For our clients using PSST’s ACA-Track™ as their monitoring, compliance and reporting solution, we suggest following this list of do’s and don’ts for no error results:
__ DO confirm that dates are accurate in HRIS (Human Resource Information System) and FM (financial management) systems.
__DO sync up payroll, human resources, and benefits data across divisions for proper data collection and aggregation.
__DO make sure all employee addresses are complete and free of typos.
__DO review your input work.
__DON’T inactivate employees instead of showing termination. The term date must be utilized in the system for accurate reporting.
__DON’T delete health insurance deduction records.
__DON’T leave blanks in ACA-required fields, like zip codes.
__DON’T get creative with fields that are for ACA reporting in your existing software systems. (i.e. personnel status). This can make it difficult for reporting, if you use it for other personnel notations.
_______________________________________________________________
Not happy with your current ACA reporting solution? For confident monitoring, compliance and reporting with true client support for the 2017 ACA reporting year, switch to ACA-Track™ by PSST with no onboarding fees.*
