Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
March 20, 2015 at 11:34 AM
Just how miserable are Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) tax problems making consumers?
We tried to get a rough-and-ready way to answer that question by developing a new consumer tax pain tool, a Form 1095-A Pain Index.
See also: Meet IRS Form 1095-A
Form 1095-A is the notice a Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) public exchange uses to document that a consumer had exchange plan coverage, what the full price of the coverage was, and how much PPACA advance premium tax credit (APTC) subsidy money the government paid for the coverage.
The instructions for the form look complicated to laypeople, and some exchange program managers, including the managers of HealthCare.gov, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) exchange enrollment and administration system, have reported having to send corrected 1095-As to some enrollees.
News organizations are posting occasional articles about long lines at Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office and private tax preparer offices. In Orlando, for example, News 13 has reported finding people camping out to get into an IRS office there. But executives at H&R Block and Liberty Tax have reported seeing fewer consumers than they expected during the first half of the season.
Consumers haven’t been posting many posts about 1095-A on two large social media services. Twitter and Reddit.
We tried to create a ruler for measuring how much 1095-A pain consumers are feeling, when compared with the usual Form 1040 pain, by looking at consumers’ posts on three tax-related message boards: Intuit’s TurboTax message board, H&R Block’s The Community message board, and the message board for The Tax Book.
For a look at what we found, keep reading.
