Monday, May 09, 2016

ObozoCare: The Next Agony

Courtesy Schenck CPA's we learn that ObozoCare 2016 will be even more of a pain for employers.  That's always a good way to reduce both profits and motivation, of course--which seems to be the REAL objective of the program.

Sample:

...a large employer is one that employed at least 50 full-time and full-time equivalents, with full time being 30 hours a week or more.

To determine this, you must look at each calendar month of 2015 and determine the number of full-time employees. Then take the remaining employees (the part-time employees) and divide their total number of hours for the month by 120 hours to determine the full-time equivalents. Do this for each month and average the 12 months, rounding down. If you have 50 or more, you are a large employer for 2016 and have a Form 1095C reporting requirement. You may also be subject to an employer mandate penalty if you fail to offer insurance or if you fail to offer affordable insurance....

And that's the simple part.  Wait!!  There's more!!

...For 2016, to avoid the failure to offer insurance penalty of $2,160 per employee, an employer must offer insurance to 95% of its full-time employees. Therefore, the room for error is only 5% of the full-time employees (or 5 employees, whichever is higher). Should an employer fail to hit 95% (by even 1%), the failure to offer insurance penalty will kick in, even though the employer did offer and pay for insurance for 94% of its full time employees. Contrast this with 2015 in that employers only had to hit 70% of its full-time employees to avoid the penalty....

And EVEN MORE (which is too complex to explain)!!!!

...the determination of which employees are full-time is a very complicated process. The IRS created two methods for determining full-time employees: the monthly measurement method and the lookback measurement method. The IRS regulations contain the specifics of each of these methods. The methods are fairly complicated to apply. For some employers, it is relatively easy to determine full-time employees; for others,  it is not. Not doing this correctly could spell disaster....

We will quibble.  ObozoCare spelled "disaster" a long time ago.  Now it's merely a matter of degree.

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