I found out in late January that I had been on my company’s (actually, my union’s) insurance plan “since September”, via words to that effect from our payroll guy. Somehow I had totally not been notified that I’d been added to to the plan, but I wasn’t complaining. (I joked, "Oh man, if I’d only known, I coulda gotten that colonoscopy I wanted!) My actual thought was “Great, that’s four months of coverage that will reduce my tax penalty!”
Erm.
So I filed my taxes on February 8, online using TurboTax, and I claimed four months of coverage.
Then yesterday, Feb. 23, my Form 1095-B showed up. And … it shows I was actually covered by the plan starting in May, but with no coverage in October (weird thing with my particular job; coverage requires working 80 hours/month, and I had a month with less than that). So basically, I was covered for seven months last year.
Given the penalty for non-coverage was $42.something per month, that means that I paid about $130 too much in penalties.
So first question: I know companies are required to get the W2 form into my hands by January 31. Why not the same rule for 1095-B?
Second question: Is there an easy way to amend my return after the fact (given that I’m expecting my refund to arrive any day now) to get back that excess penalty I paid?
granted I don’t know how complicated your tax returns are (e.g. income sources and investments) but way back I had to file an amended return due to mis-calulating my student loan interest deduction, and it was just a couple of worksheets. NBD.
Returns are amended by a 1040X. Millions of returns are amended every year, so it’ no big deal or red flag to the IRS. I’ve amended a dozen of mine over the years.
If you did your original return with some tax app or website that ought to have a button to easily amend your return. Figure to spend a couple hours messing with it.
The IRS will process your original return and send you your refund with no awareness of the amendment. This is true even if you sendin the amendment before you’ve gotten your refund. Then a couple / few months later they’ll send you a letter and a check for the amendment. With some interest since they held your money extra long. Which interest will be taxable income this year to be declared on next year’s tax return. And for which they’ll send you a 1099-INT early next year.
You know how much your time is worth versus how much extra money you’ll get back. So you may or may not choose to bother with this.
For some filing errors, which is what this is, the IRS will detect it on their own, amend your return for you, and send you a check (or bill) for the difference. So if you’re lazy you could choose to just sit tight for 6 months and see if they do it all for you. If not you can decide then whether to bother with it yourself.
In most cases you can wait until 3 years from the due date, i.e. April 2020 in this case, to file an amendment. So there’s no rush.
