The page numbers seem to have been thrown around largely at random. As far as I can tell the actual text only runs to 974 pages.
My post was purely a joke. I never thought the text was exactly 2,000 pages, as has often been claimed.
You’re not getting the distinction between “child” and “dependent”. My 23 year old son with a full-time job is still my son and he is eligible for coverage on my health plan whether I can claim him as a dependent on my taxes or not and whether he lives with me or not. The insurance company may require me to prove he is my son, just as they may require my coworker to prove his ten year old is his daughter. They usually only do that when you put the child on the plan- it’s not a yearly occurence. But there won’t be any increased audits just because it’s more likely that 23 year old supports himself than that a 10 year old does- which was the point I was responding to.
- Eligibility for coverage under my plan-
Your children under 26 years of age are eligible. This includes your natural children, stepchildren, children of domestic partners and legally adopted children, including children in a waiting period prior to finalization of adoption. Other children who are chiefly dependent on you and for whom you have assumed legal responsibility in place of the parent also are eligible; you must verify eligibility and provide documentation upon enrollment and every two years thereafter.
The only place “dependent” is mentioned is for those I don’t have a parental relationship with - nieces I have guardianship of , for example.
ACA/Obamacare rules have always been confusing and it’s still being written, of course, but I don’t recall hearing of a company verifying healthcare dependents because of “IRS” regulations before ACA/Obamacare.
Now that the IRS has become the toll taker of ACA/Obamacare, wouldn’t a general (not a criminal investigation) IRS inquiry into healthcare dependents indicate an ACA/Obamacare connection?
Personally, IDK.
No, you’re too focused on the word “dependent”.
It has a specific meaning in certain contexts, but for purposes of dependent audits it’s about whether the guy is eligible for what is commonly known as “dependent coverage”.
Meaning, you could theoretically, out of ignorance or venality, sign up your 23 year old nephew as your son. A so-called “dependent audit” which required you to prove that the guy was actually your son would root this out.
11,000 pages - :eek:
10:59 a.m. EDT October 25, 2013
Along with partisan sniping, Washington, D.C. sure creates a lot of paper. And the Affordable Care Act is really adding to the pile. The nearly 11,000 pages of regulations for this one law alone would reach three feet high if you made the mistake of printing it.
There were some 2,300 pages to the bill when it was passed. The law is still being written and rewritten, so 11,000 pages doesn’t seem to be out of the question.
It would, but why would that be more of an issue because the nephew is 23 rather than 10? Couldn’t I also have done the same with my 10 year old nephew pre-ACA? (Assuming that there is any plan that doesn’t require you to prove eligibility when you first sign up- which all of mine always have.)
Again, see the post I was responding to- this line in particular
It’s clear to me that “actually dependent” in the context of this sentence does not mean that the employer is more likely to take my word for it that a 12 year old is my offspring than to take my word for it that a 24 year old is.
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What difference does it make if you disagree with the specific rationale that RNATB gave? OK, so you think it’s no more likely that a 23 would be inelgible than a 12 year old. But the fact is that a whole lot of new people became eligible based on their ostensible relationship to the employee, and this added cost to the employers could be mitigated somewhat by (what’s known as) “dependent audits”.
What you said is that “Under the ACA the under-26 year old doesn’t have to actually be a dependent , so that issue wouldn’t increase audits”, which is incorrect.
In addition, you’re also wrong as to RNATB’s specific point. A 23 year old is a lot more likely to need to fraudulently glom onto someone else’s insurance because he’s not eligible for Medicaid if his low-income parents don’t have private insurance.
Don’t forget that there are two reasons for these audits.
The first is to see if the covered people can be legally covered, as has been discussed.
The second reason is to find out how the benefits are taxed. Health benefits paid for a dependent or spouse are a pre-tax benefit (no income or FICA taxes on them), but you can have benefits provided to a child who is not a dependent (for example, a 25-year-old child). So a company has to determine dependency status in order to correctly calculate payroll taxes.
ACA didn’t create either reason for audits - they have always been issues. However, the extension of coverage to 25 and 26 year olds was a wake-up call to a lot of insurers and medium-sized employers. Thus, many companies are just now starting to do the audits they should have been doing all along.
So… is it Obama’s fault? Only if you’re going to blame him for raising awareness of the issue.
I don’t recall being audited for dependents, but when my company had Anthem they would repeatedly deny claims by my wife at the beginning of each year until I certified that she was not covered by any other insurance. When my employer kicked their asses out for UHC it stopped happening. So, some of the audits could be insurance company based, not employer based.
If there is a typo in this post, blame it on you-know-who.
I went back and looked: my employer started such verifications “due to IRS regulations” at least by 2007, for the 2008 enrollment year. (I don’t know one way or the other about pre-2007 verifications.) This was before Obama was elected, so definitely pre-ACA/Obamacare.
Of course, I don’t know if there even were such regulations in 2007 or if my employer just decided that was a convenient scapegoat for an audit designed to save the company money. Certainly there has never been a suggestion that the IRS itself was making any inquiry; the supporting documents were sent to the HR department.
News reports started coming out a decade ago about employers doing these kinds of audits: Ford Motor Co., e.g., allegedly found 50,000 ineligible dependents between 2000 and 2004, spurring other companies to do the same checks. No IRS involvement at all.
I don’t think I did misunderstand his point- but clearly one of us has. Maybe he’ll come back and tell us who:)
Let me see if understand you correctly - you’re saying there are more of these audits because I might have somehow been able to fraudulently add my 23 year old nephew by claiming he is my son, even though every plan I’ve had requires that I prove eligibility ( birth certificates, adoption papers, marriage license etc) when putting someone of any age on the plan. In other words, the initial application requires the same documentation as the audits as far as adult children go. But are you saying that when adult children up to 26 became eligible for coverage, the employers/insurers suddenly became less confident in their application procedures than they were when they covered full-time students up to age 23? That’s the part I don’t get- either I added my 23 year old son and provided his birth certificate, or I added him some number of years ago and provided his birth certificate then. There’s no way I could hand my employer/insurance company my nephew’s birth certificate when signing up and add him as my son- it’s very obvious that I’m not listed as his parent. I could hand the insurance company my son’s birth certificate and have my nephew use my son’s name when getting medical care- but the audit won’t catch that. If you’re just saying that companies are starting to do what they should have been doing all along, I can’t disagree with that.
Understand, I’m not saying there might not be fraudulent coverage - there absolutely is and there was fraudulent coverage before the ACA. Just like there were audits before the ACA.There was probably more fraud before the ACA, as it was not uncommon for people to claim their over-19 year old children were attending college full-time, even when they weren’t*. People also claimed they were financially supporting these college students, even when they were not. As student status/financial support no longer matters, these particular frauds have disappeared entirely.But the pre-ACA audits weren’t meant to find people who were never eligible- they were mostly meant to find people who were no longer eligible- ex-spouses ( with whom you wouldn’t file a joint or married filing separately return), former stepchildren ( you’re not filing taxes with their parent anymore) over 19yo who were not attending college ( my audit required documentation for a completed term, so the below fraud didn’t work)
*( I know plenty of people who got verification of full-time enrollment and then dropped most of the classes during the full-refund period specifically to keep insurance coverage)
As I explained in my post, it does make a different in payroll tax and taxable wages whether the covered person is a dependent or not.
I don’t know anything about your plan in particular. I’m pretty sure I’ve never been asked to provide any sort of documentation for any dependents.
The only reason for the audits is to maximize dividend payments. Unless someone has numbers to the contrary, the audit rate is only perceived as have increased … because the controversy over the ACA is making people think about it more.
I have- for each of the four or five different plans I’ve had over the past 25 years. When my kids were born, I had 30 or 60 days to send in the birth certificate- to the very same insurance company that paid for the delivery. If other insurance companies/employers didn’t require documentation when putting someone on the policy and are asking for it now , I can’t really blame that on the ACA.
Does it make a difference in the taxes if there’s no difference in price? For example,my employer offers family or individual coverage. As long as I cover one person other than myself, the price is the same, both to me and my employer. So covering myself and my husband costs exactly the same as covering myself, my husband and my kids (one of whom is not my dependent according to the IRS). Should I expect some portion of those premiums to show up on my W2 next year?
It’s possible that it varies by company. But even if you were right, it sounds like you’re disputing the point of ever having a dependent audit ever.
I don’t see how your point relates to whether the ACA would cause it. You’re effectively saying “I don’t see that there’s ever any point of doing a dependent audit, since the documentation was already provided, therefore you can’t blame it on the ACA”.
If you accept the premise that dependent audits make sense in some context - and they obviously do, or nobody would do them, with or without the ACA - then the only question is whether there’s anything about the ACA which would make them more likely. Disputing the entire premise of dependent audits is just avoiding the issue.
You Americans are weird.
I was working in a small industrial town, with a lot of unionized industrial workers. There was a huge turnover of employee domestic arrangements - when tidying up the dependents list one year, the programmer for HR remarked on a family with 5 different surnames - his, hers, his from a previous marriage, hers from a previous marriage, and possibly a step-something-or-other. While it’s not medical costs (paid for by the provincial government) the dental and prescription benefits were extremely generous - the union fund to maintain those ran out of money during a previous strike.
To enroll the children (or “spouse”) one had only to go to HR and fill out a form with their names. No birth certificates, no marriage certificates (how does that work if they are common-law?). Even the audit done in about 2003 - the only requirement was that we re-list our dependents and sign certifying this was true (with the warning about fraud charge liability and payback if the information was false).
I am not disputing the premise of dependent audits. I have repeatedly said that they uncover fraud. I am disputing the idea that the ACA’s requirement to cover adult children under age 26 makes either fraud or the audits more likely. If my employer/insurer required proof that my son was actually my son when I put him on the policy at age 10, then he’s still my son when they do the audit when he’s 23 and it would be pointless to conduct an audit because employees may have claimed some other 23 year old as their child. And the fact that the ACA requires that coverage regardless of student status or financial dependency completely eliminated certain frauds in the 19-24 year old group may actually make fraud *less *likely now that pre-ACA.
That doesn't mean there's no point to having audits- I may have divorced my husband since putting him and my then-stepchildren on the policy, or no longer have custody of the niece that I added when she was eligible. Since audits go back at least as far as 2004, there are clearly reasons to conduct audits that are unrelated to the ACA or to the requirement to cover adult children. And it may be that some employers pre-ACA didn't require you to document eligibilty and now are conducting audits requiring documentation- but I find it hard to blame the ACA if it only served as a wake-up call to employers/insurers to take the steps they should have been taking anyway to prevent fraud.