The Obama administration announced on Friday that somewhere in the ballpark of 800,ooo healthcare.gov users were sent the wrong tax information for their 2014 tax filings. The government is asking those who got the erroneous information to delay filing their taxes.
It’s not just the feds. “California, which is running its own insurance market, on Thursday announced a similar problem affecting about 100,000 people in that state.”
The mistake will delay the tax refunds of about 1M people and it may also affect the size of the refunds. Some 50,000 people who have already submitted their tax returns will have to resubmit them.
CBS News is reporting, “The errors disclosed Friday are in new forms that HealthCare.gov sent to millions of consumers receiving coverage through the federal insurance market that serves most states. Those forms, called 1095-As, are like a W-2 for health care. They provided a month-by-month accounting of the subsidies consumers received to help pay their premiums. That information is then used to make sure everybody got the right amount, not too much, or too little.”
Apparently the administration is still looking for the “root cause” of the mishap.
Andy Slavitt, a top administration official overseeing federal health insurance programs, said the administration is still investigating the root cause of the problem. Slavitt said it had to do with erroneous calculations of a “benchmark” premium that is used to help determine the amount of subsidies that individuals receive.
Some consumers may have gotten too large of a subsidy and some may have gotten too little.
“We’re not doing any victory laps,” HealthCare.gov CEO Kevin Counihan told reporters.
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