Assumption Parish School Board

The Challenge

In March 2018, Assumption Parish School Board received an IRS Letter 226-J notifying the K-12 it faced IRS penalties totaling $1.2 million for Affordable Care Act non-compliance in reporting year 2015. The Parish was not confident it could successfully address the IRS claims of non-compliance without expert assistance, especially since the parish had handled ACA reporting for 2015 using only internal resources due to its limited budget.

The Solution

“We’re a small K-12 school system with only 3,444 students, and we do not have an assigned person that has the ACA Non-Compliance expertise needed to oversee this process,” Shannon explained. “When we got the penalty letter, we knew we had issues, but we also knew we were in over our heads. We were not understanding what the IRS wanted us to do in response to the letter.”

“This is more than what most companies would do to help a small client,” Shannon said. “But they understood our limited resources and helped us help ourselves to avoid an overwhelming penalty.”

After addressing the IRS letter with the Assumption Parish School Board, the decision was made to consult with the ACA experts at PSST’s ACA-Track™.
“I shared the IRS letter with our Client Success Advisor who immediately put me in touch with the PSST Client Success Vice President,” Clement explained. “Even though we did not use ACA-Track for the year in question [2015], PSST reviewed the letter and gave us guidelines and the exact steps to take to address each claim with the IRS letter.”
As a result, Assumption Parish followed the advice provided by PSST, and the $1.2 million penalty was reduced to zero.
“This is more than what most companies would do to help a small client,” Shannon said. “But they understood our limited resources and helped us help ourselves to avoid an overwhelming penalty.”
Clement said the decision to use PSST’s ACA-Track as its reporting solution continues to be well worth the money spent.