15,592 Employees | 4,000 Employee Waivers | 100% Reporting by IRS Deadlines
Executive Summary
Ft. Worth Independent School District (ISD) has a significant student enrollment with approximately 85,000 students managed by 15,592 employees, as reported in the recent school year. The impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) created the necessity for compliance preparedness and for identifying who in this large school system was ultimately responsible for making necessary compliance decisions. Faced with the need for employee tracking and reporting, Ft. Worth ISD found a disconnect between existing software for monitoring employees and their hours worked.
While Employee Benefits Coordinator Felicia Mouton indicated Ft. Worth ISD had purposeful data silos, data validation and sharing would be imperative to successful 2015 reporting at year-end in June 2016. Ft. Worth ISD utilized PSST’s ACA-Track™ as its ACA solution. PSST’s ACA-Track™ collects and monitors employee hours worked for 100 percent of the employer’s employee base, with total data integration for any payroll system or HRIS and most financial management systems. ACA-Track™ works with Ft. Worth ISD’s disparate systems, extracting and importing data for accountability and usability under the district’s benefits administration.
The Challenges at Fort Worth
Employers like Ft. Worth ISD turn to PSST’s ACA-Track™ because making determinations about employee eligibility based on average hours of service can be an imposing task. For example, many employers may not have a totally accurate count of unpaid leave hours attributable to the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA), or jury duty — all three of which must be considered in determining ACA full-time status.
For Ft. Worth ISD, much of the important data necessary for ACA compliance and reporting was housed in four different systems: (a) the financial management system offering employee demographics and payroll; (b) the online employee benefits enrollment system; (c) a time and attendance system, and (d) a substitute calling system for time and work tracking. Additionally, Ft. Worth ISD has a third-party administrator. The key was keeping the data separate and looking for what was necessary, and then importing the data necessary from each system as the data source of value. For the June 2016 deadline for 1094 reporting, this also meant reviewing the 4,000 employees who waive health insurance.
How ACA-Track™ Helped
“We worked a miracle together, I think,” said Felicia Mouton, Ft. Worth’s Employee Benefits Coordinator. “It was a pretty smooth transition… there will only be a few corrections tied to social security number matches.”
This social security or taxpayer identification number (TIN) issue in ACA tracking and reporting can be cumbersome. Most generally, the issue occurs with the advent of a marriage or a divorce—the social security name may not match the actual name. PSST has found that it occurs in two percent of a school district’s records.
Mouton attributes the district’s success in accurate and timely IRS reporting to being able to review monthly “Snapshots” from the ACA-Track™ system’s data quality management reports. This allowed Ft. Worth ISD to be aware of and manage any complexities and/or risks.
She also said auditing and other baseline system reporting available was extremely useful. PSST’s ACA-Track™ has options to group, sort, filter, and export to Microsoft Excel, as well as individual user grid layouts supported by color coding — all to provide the user with the power needed to analyze details.
ACA-Track™ electronically creates IRS 1095 and 1094 reports, and maintains all ACA compliance data in one location for easy retrieval in the event of an IRS audit.
Mouton pointed out support from PSST’s ACA-Track™ Client Success Team was “excellent and very responsive.” Collecting data in a timely manner was the bottom line, she said. “I don’t know if we would have made the year-end deadline without them.”
Results & Return On Investments
The ACA remains one of the most significant pieces of legislation passed since the inception of Social Security in 1935 and impacts every employer.
PSST’s ACA-Track™ creates an environment of preparedness on a monthly basis, by looking at the data necessary for accurate reporting. Dealing with personal identification information (PII), Ft. Worth ISD needed an environment to secure the appropriate ACA employee data. ACA-Track™, a cloud-based data center, has been SAS 70-certified since 2010 and currently is certified under the new SSAE 16 standard. All PII is encrypted in the database so if, in the unlikely event the data is compromised, no personal information is exposed. All data transfers are conducted via Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS).
In the end, support from PSST’s ACA-Track™ Client Success Team created a timely, and efficient approach to head toward compliance. “This is what we needed, and this is what we received,” Mouton summarized.
