Understanding ACA for Employers and Businesses

Between tracking hours, ensuring that benefits are offered to those who are eligible, and filing forms, many HR professionals spend hours working on ACA requirements to ensure compliance.

What is the Affordable Care Act (ACA)?

Before we get started on understanding ACA and how it affects your employer or business, let’s take a step back and get familiar with what the Affordable Care Act is. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a comprehensive health care reform law that was enacted in early 2010 and was created with three goals in mind; to make affordable health insurance available to more people, to expand the Medicaid program, and to innovate ways to lower the costs of health care in general.

With this law in place, the way health care works for employers and businesses changed. We’re here to help explain ACA for businesses both small and large and what you need to do to protect yourself and help your employees.

ACA and Large Businesses

The ACA changed the way employers buy and offer insurance to their employees. Under the ACA, larger companies (50 or more full-time employees) are required to offer affordable health insurance to their employees.

The ACA also states that companies are required to:

Inform employees of their health insurance options, including coverage through the Marketplace.
Pay penalties if they do not offer health insurance coverage and fall under the definition of large employer.
Pay penalties if they offer unaffordable coverage or coverage that does not cover at least 60% of all costs and the employee.
Automatically enroll all employees in health insurance plans if they have more than 200 full-time employees.

ACA and Small Businesses

With all the rules and regulations in place for large companies (50 or more FT employees), you might be wondering what the ACA means for a small business. Small businesses have more flexibility and while the mandate might not even apply to your business, there are some rules under the ACA that all employers should be aware of.

Some of those rules are:

All businesses (small and large) are required to report to certain information about employees to the IRS, regardless of whether you’re offering insurance.
If you offer level-funded or self-funded coverage 1094/1095 “B” reporting is required.
There is a 90-day waiting period in which you can offer an employee health insurance. If you offer insurance to one full-time employee, it generally must be offered to every employee within 90 days of his or her date of hire.
You must give employees information about the plans being offered, which is called the “Summary of Benefits and Coverage.”

Staying Compliant with ACA

You might be wondering with all the rules and regulations how do you ensure your company stays compliant and penalty free. That’s where isolved can help! With isolved People Cloud, we can help simplify the ACA reporting process for Applicable Large Employers (ALEs) by providing 1094 and 1095 forms, calculating your FTEs to determine ALE status, reporting for employee status changes and affordability, and distributing and e-filing the forms on your behalf.

With isolved you can:

Eliminate the stress of ACA reporting
Take the work of creating and distributing the forms, all you do is supply the information, we do the rest
Stay compliant with ACA requirements and penalty free

Don’t want to switch payroll providers? You don’t have to with our ACA Print & File solution. Learn more here.