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The Employee Side Of Insurance

Decent Essays

Employees
Reimbursement Arrangements
Let us take a moment to focus on the employee side of insurance. Lacking access to many of the professional research databases, many small businesses (including accounting firms) use Google as their main source of finding information. Sadly, this means that many fall prey to misadvise. Jeffrey Joyner, in his online article on small business health insurance states, that it is allowable for the employer to reimburse the employee for their health insurance premiums (Joyner J., 2016). However, IRC § 9831 (a)(2) states that if an S corporation maintains multiple arrangements for either shareholders or employees (and they are not covered by family coverage), the arrangements will qualify as a group health plan; and thus may eventually be subject to excise taxes under ACA market reforms. Mr. Joyner is partially correct; as long as the S corporation has only one participant in the plan, it is exempt under the “fewer than two participants who are current employees” IRS Notice 2015-17 exemption. Additionally, it is stated that employers that continue to reimburse individual plan payments, “after June 30, 2015… may be liable for the Code § 4980D excise tax” IRS Notice 2015-17.
Due to the misadvise contained in web-articles, many are under the impression that penalties will not be assessed until further guidance is released and until then it is permissible for a small corporation to continue on reimbursing multiple plans. However, there

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