IRS to Employers: There’s No Escaping ObamaCare

♦ 01/15/2013 ♦ Leave a comment

No matter how much big brother threatens, it won’t work.  Obamacare is doomed to failure.  It can’t be sustained when one pays out more than is taken in.  The IRS is now warning employers that there is no complete way around Obamacare.  The IRS recently issued a 144-page notice of “proposed regulations providing guidance under section 4980H of the Internal Revenue Code … with respect to the shared responsibility for employers regarding employee health coverage.” That is, the agency is notifying the public that it will be promulgating rules as to how it interprets the employer mandate and how it intends to enforce it.

New American

Now this employer mandate states employers with 50 or more full-time employees to offer “affordable” health insurance coverage to those employees, with “affordable” defined as costing an employee no more than 9.5 percent of his total household income. For every full-time employee who opts out of “unaffordable” employer-sponsored coverage and obtains insurance on a state exchange, often with a taxpayer subsidy, the employer will be fined up to $2,000.

Now how is an employer to know what the total income is in a household, if other people work at different companies?  What employee will tell all their private business?

Whatever happened to the privacy act?

“The Treasury Department and the IRS are aware of various structures being considered under which employers might use temporary staffing agencies (or other staffing agencies) purporting to be the common law employer to evade application of section 4980H,” the IRS notice states.

New American

Now there are 2 ways an employer can try to beat the system:  hire an employee directly for, say, 20 hours a week, then hire the same person through a temporary agency for another 20 hours per week, thereby getting 40 hours’ worth of work out of that individual without either the employer or the agency having to classify him as a full-time employee.

The Second way is not hire the individual directly at all but might hire him through more than one temporary agency, again obtaining 40 hours’ worth of work a week but keeping the individual from being considered a full-time employee of either the employer or any of the temporary agencies.

And they are still adding rules to Obamacare.  It is possible the final rules might include an anti-abuse rule to address the situations described” above. Essentially, if an employer tries to skirt the law’s intent by using one or more temporary agencies to get a full-time employee without having to classify him as such, the IRS will simply declare that the individual is indeed a full-time employee and add him to the employer’s count of said employees.

“So Obama rams through a costly, onerous, time-consuming and job-killing health insurance bill, and employers will look for ways to limit or minimize its impact — just as rich liberals do with taxes,” Matthews remarks. “And the IRS expects it, which is why it’s putting employers on notice.”

New American

So with the IRS warning, through intimidation, both ObamaCare and the IRS are affronts to liberty and that the former is plainly unconstitutional, no matter what the Supreme Court — which couldn’t even decide whether the $2,000-per-employee punishment is a tax or a penalty — may have declared.

And enforcing all these new rules will require more bureaucrats.  Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration says the IRS will need more than 2,000 employees to monitor compliance with Obama’s health care law, and that’s just for 2013.

Pelosi was right when she said that Obamacare would create 400,000 new jobs, but those are government jobs, and mostly IRS agents……since when can the IRS warn a business how many workers they can have, and how many hours they must work?

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