The Patient Responsibility and Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare and referred to here as the ACA, creates lots of risks and potential costs for small businesses and their tax advisors. Even for small businesses not required by the ACA to provide their employees with health insurance.
Accordingly, tax advisors need to understand how the law applies to small businesses.
More Information About the Monograph?
Last updated in December 2016 after the 21st Century Cures Act was passed by Congress, this short monograph (roughly a 70 page pdf document) helps tax advisors help their clients sidestep the catastrophic small business penalties embedded in the ACA by explaining and describing the following subjects:
• The full-time equivalent employee rules and why they’re important
• The new SHOP exchanges and what they offer
• The small business tax credit
• The new rules for healthcare reimbursement arrangements (including the Qualified Small Employer Health Reimbursement Arrangement which becomes an option for 2016)
• The new nondiscrimination rules for employee group health plans
• The interplay between the ACA and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs)
• The ACA’s new taxes
• New reporting requirements for employers (small business focus)
The monograph (which is what we like to call our pdf monographs) also provides five Appendixes to supplement the discussion and help tax advisors communicate effectively with clients, including:
• Appendix A which gives an example of an Employee Health Plan Information Packet for a small business
• Appendix B which shows an example of a standard W-2 for a small business employee
• Appendix B which shows an example of W-2 for a shareholder-employee of a one-person S corporation
• Appendix D which supplies you with a sample client letter you can either use as is or as a first “starter” draft for the letter you firm sends to clients
• Appendix E which is a copy of the IRS Notice 2013-54 (the notice that how the Affordable Care Act applies to health reimbursement arrangements)
• Appendix F which is a copy of IRS Notice 2015-17 ( the most up-to-date information on the $100-per-day penalty)
• Appendix G which provides another client-targeted document, “Ten Obamacare Facts Small Businesses Owners Must Know” that came from our blog but which you might want to print as a client hand-out from your firm.
Note: You may reprint and use as your own the sample client letter and the “Ten Obamacare Facts…” piece, but please don’t post either item at your website. The search engines (Google, Microsoft Bing, and so forth) will quickly spot the duplication of text and then penalize all the sites that provide it—including yours.
About the Authors
Stephen L. Nelson is the managing member of a Seattle area public accounting firm that provides tax accounting services to small businesses and their owners. A CPA for over three decades, Nelson holds an MBA in Finance from the University of Washington and an MS in Taxation from Golden Gate University. He is the author of dozens of best-selling books about accounting and finance, including Quicken for Dummies (which sold more than 1,000,000 copies) and QuickBooks for Dummies (which sold more than 500,000 copies). He’s also taught business taxation in the graduate tax school at Golden Gate University.
Elizabeth C. Nelson is a tax senior with Stephen L. Nelson CPA PLLC and specializes in small multistate and international S corporations and partnerships. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Accounting from Western Governors University and is the co-author of Excel Data Analysis for Dummies, a popular how-to book about using Microsoft Excel for big data analysis and the monograph, Preparing the 3115 Form for the New Tangible Property Regulations.
Money Back Guarantee
As with all of our publications, the Small Businesses and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) monograph comes with a money-back guarantee, so if you purchase it and then for whatever reason find it’s not what you need or what you expected, simply email us your refund request. We will happily issue you a refund, no questions and no hassles. Note that we handle refunds manually so it usually takes a work day or two for us to process your refund.
Notice
This monograph was written to share basic information about tax law implications of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The e-book is not intended to replace the services of a competent legal, tax, or business advisor. If legal or other expert assistance is required, the services of a professional should be sought. Furthermore, while both the publisher and authors have made every effort to offer the most current, correct, and clearly-expressed information possible, inadvertent errors can occur and the rules and regulations governing accounting standards and tax laws often change. Further, the application and impact of rules and laws can vary widely from case to case based upon the unique facts involved. Be careful!
