Morning, everybody, or good afternoon. Thank you for joining today’s webinar. I’m Robyn Carlini, your webinar moderator or witch today, but I promise only good spells today for a good reporting season. This is Trick or Treat Busting the Biggest ACA Myths. And a little bit of housekeeping. This webinar is being recorded and all registrants will be receiving the recording tomorrow. And in your Q and A or chat box, you can submit questions and we’ll answer throughout. There’s also an exit survey if you don’t mind filling out before you exit. And a little disclaimer. Selerix, this is a knowledge based webinar, but you will still need your legal counsel for those legalese questions. And for everyone on the line that is new, and welcome you. Sorry about that. My little toe toToto dog is acting up. Thank you for joining us today. As you can see some of our stats, one in four companies in The US currently use us for ACA reporting and we have mitigated over $650,000,000 in those pesky spooky penalties. And now I’ll introduce Ashley Pope, or she might be someone else today, Director of ACA Services. Ashley, would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself? Good afternoon, everyone. I am Ashley Pope. I have been in the ACA world for almost eleven years now. Today, I am representing the bones of ACA and what can happen when you unbury those bones. Okay. And we’re gonna start off with a poll. Let me go ahead and launch that. Okay, which ACA scenario is the scariest this Halloween? Is it the dreaded two twenty six J letter in your mailbox? Ten ninety five errors found the day before filing? A ghost employee still offered coverage, variable hour tracking that mysteriously vanished or nothing because you’re an ACA exorcist. Every one of these is a real nightmare. We have answers all over the place today. 38% the dreaded 26 J letter in your mailbox, thirteen percent ten ninety five C errors, 31% a ghost employee still offered coverage, and then both 6% variable hour tracking that vanished and nothing. I’m an exorcist. Well, glad to know we have some exorcists in the group here. Totally understand. These are scary. That two six j letter means somebody already counted your ghosts for you, and now you’re gonna have faith for them. But we’re gonna find out which of these which of these are tricks and which are treats. So we’re gonna talk about ghostly eligibility rules. If a new hire schedule is unpredictable, you can skip just calling them part time from day one and skip tracking their hours. Is that a myth or a fact? Is it a trick or a treat? Robin, what do you say? You’re on mute, Robin. So this is definitely a myth. Variable hour, though we call them part time in our payroll files, are not really the same thing. A part time employee is somebody that you reasonably expect to work fewer than thirty hours a week. A variable hour employee is someone who you really don’t know. That variable means it fluctuates, ups and downs, right? So you have to apply those wonderful measurement periods to track actual hours before you can classify anyone as part time or time for ACA purposes. Skipping it means you can get one of those two twenty six J letters. We don’t wanna uncover the bones. This is where the invisible things hide and we wanna make sure everybody’s hours, status and waiting periods are tracked by systems because you don’t wanna wait till it’s too late. Oh, next up. Robin, you’re on mute. The spooky spirits are upon me today because my menu disappeared. So the question is, once an ongoing employee’s hour to drop below full time, can you just take their coverage away? Wow. Is that a myth or a fact? Let’s find out. Let’s find out. It is a myth. It is a tall tale. It is a legend. Under the look back measurement method, an employee status is locked in for their stability period. You can’t just take away coverage. A mid year dip in hours doesn’t necessarily end the offer Coverage needs to be carried out through their stability period. Full time employees are reasonably expected to work thirty hours a week or more. Right? So we know those are benefits eligible people. We need to be making sure that we’re taking care of them. Even though they may drop below full time, there are still requirements there and you don’t want the IRS to come haunting you for those. Affordability tricks and treats. Let’s hope they’re treats. So only the lowest cost plan offered to the employee being self only option because it’s all the IRS cares about, actually has to pass the ACA’s affordability test. Trick, treat, math, myth or fact. What do we think? I think I know this one. If you know in the chat, you can drop it in. And it is a… Fact! The IRS only cares about the lowest cost plan offered to employees and they only care about employee only coverage. They don’t care what you paid for the family tier or for just you and a kid. They only care about what you as an employee have to pay, and that is what determines affordability. You have three different options to test that affordability against. Are going to remind you for 2026 that affordability threshold rises to 9.96% of the employee’s household income. That is up from 2025. So make sure you’re keeping an eye on those things, and I know lots people are in open enrollment for new plans that start January 1, so make sure you are lining up to twenty twenty seven’s affordability rates. Offers of coverage that can come back to bite. Oh, we don’t like those. So as long as you offer coverage to the employee, you’ve met the mandate. We hear that a lot. Is it true? I can just go off for anything and I meet the mandate for ACA and I can’t get in trouble later? Let’s find out. It’s a myth. You can’t just offer anything. It has to meet certain standards. Darn. Has to be at least minimum essential coverage. It also has to extend to an employee’s dependence, not just the employee. Spouse isn’t necessarily required. But again, employee plus dependence, and it has to be to at least 95% of those full time equivalent employees. Minimum value is what keeps you completely out of the hole. That is the piece that affordability is tested against. So you really want to make sure you have both. But at a minimum, you want minimum essential coverage. The tangled web of ACA reporting. Alright. If an employee waives coverage, there’s no ACA reporting required for them. Sounds like it could be Sounds reasonable, but it also sounds a little too easy, doesn’t it? Yeah. Is the IRS ever reasonable? No. So if an employee weighs coverage, do you still have to report on them? Absolutely. Yes. You still have to report on them. Those are the things the IRS wants to know. Yeah. If the employee shows up in the marketplace, the IRS certainly don’t want to give them a tax credit if they were offered coverage that was affordable. So they need to know about both enrolled employees and employees that waived coverage. So this is a 100% a myth. Okay. Off to our next poll. Sorry. I’m moving around. My menu keeps disappearing. The gremlins have arrived in your computer. They really have today. You fed them after midnight. How haunted is your ACA data heading into filing season? Spotless, not a ghost in sight? A few friendly ghosts to clean up? It’s a haunted house, big cleanup ahead. I’m too scared to look. My ACA exorcists are on it. Okay. Let’s just also say, I don’t know if there’s any right answer here, but friendly ghosts are okay. Most employers have a few. That’s reasonable. Yes. That’s a reasonable choice. Okay. No surprises here. 0% said spotless. 40% few friendly ghosts. 13% it’s a haunted house. And 47 which is actually a stunt of great. My ACA exorcists are on it. Yay. We like that. Okay. Compliance miss that just won’t die. They look like me. So that lovely statement that we hear a good bit, we have fewer than 50 employees, so ACA doesn’t apply to us. Right? Kind of sounds reasonable. Sounds reasonable to me. It is the IRS, so I’m guessing there’s catch. And thank you, Rebecca, for always putting in chat your answers. We appreciate that. She’s guessing with us. This is Vet. 50 employees. ACA doesn’t apply to you. However, in true governmental fashion, there’s a catch there. There’s some fine print that tells you, no, you don’t have to report ten ninety five C information. However, if you have self insured or level funded plans, guess what? You still have to report. You have to report on all the covered lives and submit a b form regardless of employee’s employer’s size. Sorry about that. That’s okay. I’ll go back. Second catch here, if you’re part of a control group of commonly owned companies, it doesn’t matter what your FTE count is. It matters what the group’s aggregated FTE count is. So if as an entirety commonly owned group, you bust that 50 FTE count and you are definitely still having to report even though you may be small. Oh, part time employees don’t count toward the 50 employee threshold that determines DCA reporting. That again sounds pretty reasonable. Yeah. But it’s a myth. Part timers count. They just count differently. They count fractionally. So, you’re going to take all of your full time employees and they count as one each. And then, you’re going to take the monthly hours worked by your part time people. You’re going to cap it at 120 for each. So, if they worked one hundred and thirty hours, you’re only using 120 of those hours. You’re going to divide that by 120. That’s what gives you, plus your full time count, your applicable large employer FTE count. So we’ve given an example here. A business with 35 full timers and 40 part timers averaging twenty hours a week, lands around 64 and crosses the line possibly without anyone noticing, And that’s not a good thing because it will come to creep up on you later like a zombie, like like our little zombie dolls up there. And I know this witch does not like math, so it’s good to have a solution that you can just set it and forget it. Right? Yep. Something that will tell you what your level is every single month. The myth of set it and forget it. Funny that I just said that. Yes. It is. You know what? We can just worry about ACA reporting in January. I have tons of haunting and trick or treating to do, and then I’ve got to go eat turkey. And then I have to go buy presents. Santa’s gonna come visit. And all the holidays and in laws are gonna show up. I’m just gonna wait. Do we think that Don’t a lot of people… Actually, this is the biggest myth buster. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. We kind of gave you the answer before we went to the next slide, but this is definitely a myth. We preach this all day long, every day around here at Salyrix. ACA is a year round process if you want to stay out of the haunted halls of the IRS. So you need to be keeping up with offer and eligibility and affordability. All of that needs to be taken care of. And if you just set it aside and forget about it, then I can guarantee when it is time to report, you’re gonna find all kinds of things that you should have caught last January, and now you cannot retroactively fix them because you cannot offer an employee that you missed coverage a year ago today. It doesn’t work that way. So we like to say you need to set aside time every month to have your ACA coffee break. Thirty minutes. Check to see that you’ve made all the offers you should have made. Check to see who’s past the threshold for hours of service to make sure that their benefit’s eligible and that you’re covering them. Double check that all your data is accurate. Like those things that thirty minutes a month now will save you so much headache later. Okay, our Which next systems feed your ACA data? Payroll, the crypt keepers of the hours, HRIS, where employee records rise from the dead. Timekeeping, the ticking clock in the walls. Benefits admin, the haunted offer and enrollment maze. Oh, the scariest one. Spreadsheets, the first Excel of a thousand tabs, and it does have a thousand tabs. Yeah. I feel for people that do that. They live in a permanent haunted house, honestly. Right. It looks like 33% payroll, 19% HRIS, 6% timekeeping, 44 been admin, 0% today spreadsheets. Yay, go homemade houses. Okay. I’m assuming you got a question. Oh, it’s a phone. Thank you very much, Laura. I thought it was a question. She just thought we looked nice. Okay. If our payroll system is accurate, our ACA data must be accurate too. Oh, this is a definite math. Payroll obviously tracks wages and hours for pay purposes, not necessarily for ACA purposes. That needs to be done separately. You might have a payroll system that does that, but you definitely wanna make sure you have everything set up correctly, that you’re tracking accurately because, again, we don’t wanna get to January and find out that things went awry back in February and we weren’t paying attention. Accurate payroll is absolutely necessary for HCA, but that’s not the end all be all. Okay. A peek into year end. What’s changing for 2027? Any changes, Ashley? Thank you. March 2, deadline to get those ten ninety five… Form ten ninety five c out to your employees. However, if you live in California, they make you do it early. It has to be by January 31. March 31, this hadn’t changed. Deadline to e file the form ten ninety four C and the ten ninety five Cs to the IRS. Or if you’re a small employer with those self insurer level funded plans, it’s time to send those B forms. If you’re filing more than 10 returns, and this is not just for ACA, this is returns overall to the IRS, you cannot mail in. You have to electronically file. Twenty twenty seven’s ACA affordability percentage is going up to 10.22%. So those of you in open enrollment are with plans that will start early in 2027. Make sure you have accounted for that and that your employee contributions are going to follow it so that you stay affordable. That 2027 a penalty, which is the failure to offer coverage to 95%, it’s going to go up. It’ll be $3.15 a month per employee, which comes out to $3,780 per employee per year. That’s kind of pricey. And then obviously, you get penalized with that one, you are getting penalized with the next one too, which is the $49.80 HP for unaffordable or nonminimum value coverage, and it’s gonna go up to 5,670 per employee per year. That’s scary. Very scary. That will hot your drinks. Okay. And our very last poll. What’s your next step after today’s session? Is it review our ACA processes internally, look into tools and solutions to improve accuracy, discuss internally with your team, no immediate next steps, or you want to summon the SOLIRISS exorcists. Okay. Come in with our anti IRS water and exercise those things. Yes, and we have those answers, and, we will follow-up with you according to how you answered. And now, just a little information about our other services. Everyone here I’m sure is aware we do ACA reporting, but Solaris offers other solutions. So, just wanted to tell you a little bit about it. We have BEN Select, which is your benefit administration solution. We have COBRA HSA, FSA, Engage services, which is our multi channel email communication tool, and Dependent Verification. So, if you’re interested in any of those, let us know. And now, thank you for attending. Now we’ll take your questions, and there’s a QR code for next month’s webinar, Give Thanks for Clean Data. We will not be dressing up like turkeys. No. Or pilgrims. No. So while we wait to see if anyone has questions, in true Ashley in advance. Yep. In true Ashley form, I have got to do my cheesy cheesy dad joke. And today, I have two. We’re on the last webinar, last Aspen Nerds. You probably heard one of them, but not the second So here’s your trivia for the day first. Only half of the Halloween candy buck in The United States is given to trick or treaters. The other 50 is for self treating. So that means much like me and my bag of airheads at home, only part of it is going to the trick or treaters because I meet the other half. But, Robin, what is the best thing to put in candy? I don’t know. Your teeth, of course. I was gonna say And then my second cheesy joke of the Halloween season. Why is the cemetery so popular? Why? Because everybody’s dying to get in. Those… Okay. And no questions are coming in because I think a lot of people said they are their ACA exorcists, which is good. That’s been great. Yes. But we hope we answered some questions for you today with the myth busting, and we hope to see you next month and happy Halloween. Thank you all. Have a spooky great time. Bye bye. Bye.
