At the end of November, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced inflation adjustments for HIPAA penalties and a few others. Group health plan sponsors and other entities who violate any rules of HIPAA will see a penalty increase of 1.182%.

HIPAA is broken down into four tiers of violations, categorized by level of culpability, with minimum and maximum penalty amounts for each and an annual cap for multiple breaches of an identical HIPAA provision. We've outlined these changes for you:

Minimum Penalties

2021

2020<...

ACA Testing your knowledge is back, and we have several tough scenarios to dissect. Last week, Michelle Barki presented the latest ACA Testing Your Knowledge webinar and posed several questions that left viewers, and Medcom team members, scratching our heads.

A new client calls and states they do not have a reporting solution in place for 2022 reporting on the 2021 tax year. They recently changed payroll vendors and realized their new vendor does not offer ACA reporting.

What is the solution?

All employers should know the...

On Tuesday, our senior legal counsel, Michelle Barki, laid out some tough situations related to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We understand there is a lot of confusion around the ACA, and we’re here to help! Below we’ve listed a few situations each followed by guidance from our senior legal counsel.

Your clients are using the Federal Poverty Safe Harbor and have never had to pay a 4980H(b) penalty, but they pay a lot in premiums. Now, they want to go to the W-2 Method and pass more of the cost of...

Earlier this week, Medcom hosted a webinar with our Senior Legal Counsel, Michelle Barki. During the presentation, Michelle discussed a couple of things that signal major potential changes ahead for Affordable Care Act reporting. If you'd like to view the recording, register using this link. But we are also here to share a summary of Michelle's main points.

As some of us know, Applicable Large Employers (companies with 50 or more team members) have two tax obligations under the IRS rules for the ACA. If ALEs...