Taxable Talk

This past weekend I saw my first Form 1095-A. That’s the form that individuals covered by health insurance through a plan form an exchange will receive. In California, 800,000 of these were mailed. Unfortunately, 100,000 of these were wrong. Oops.

As reported by the Los Angeles Times, Covered California sent out the wrong forms:

Covered California said it sent incorrect information on some forms because its customer data didn’t match what health plans had on file.

For instance, there may have been a discrepancy for the person’s length of coverage in 2014 and amount of subsidy received.

Amy Palmer, an exchange spokeswoman, said the agency is reconciling that information and sending revised forms to the affected customers by later this month.

There’s another major issue here: No one knows which of the forms are correct until Covered California completes its review of all of the accounts. Heh, there’s only a 12.5% chance that any specific 1095-A is wrong….

And let’s give a huge demerit to Covered California’s webpages. One would think that if there’s a mistake impacting 12.5% of customers you would publicize it. That’s especially the case when this is a mistake that impacts these individuals when they file their tax returns. However, Covered California’s main webpage and its 1095-A page are both silent about this error.

No wonder customer dissatisfaction with ObamaCare remains high, and this is before many individuals discover that they’ll owe money on the advanced credits they received.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2015 at 8:36 pm and is filed under IRS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.