Americans for Tax Reform,
The Associated Press is reporting today that an “erroneous” glitch in Obamacare tax forms is causing filing season to come to a halt for 800,000 taxpayers. Tens of thousands of these families have actually already filed and will need to file amended returns redundantly.
Americans for Tax Reform can shed some light on what the “erroneous” problem is. The affected form for Healthcare.gov enrollees is known as an IRS Form 1095-A. It documents health insurance coverage obtained through the federal healthcare.gov exchange. It reports premiums charged by month. It is supposed to also report the amount of a tax credit advanced from the IRS to the covered family’s insurance company. Finally, a middle column is supposed to say what the average premium amount was for the second lowest-cost silver plan (the poetically-named “SLCSP”).
All three inputs–monthly premium cost of the health insurance plan, the SLCSP, and the advanced premium tax credit amount–are vital to calculating the accurate tax credit a taxpayer is entitled to under the Obamacare law. Without even one of these inputs, the calculation is thrown off. It would therefore also be impossible to determine whether the advanced tax credit was too generous (in which case the taxpayer may owe the IRS money), or too stingy (in which case the taxpayer claims the remaining credit amount on his 1040 filing).