Confused about 1095-C reporting? Nearly everyone is. When doing research on filling out Form 1095-C, I came across this helpful slide show put together by Mario K. Castillo. He has also published a slide show covering the 1094-C.
The slide shows are a good starting point before diving into the IRS’s instructions, which can be found here. The instructions estimate that each 1095-C form will take 12 minutes to fill out. Multiply that by the number of employees that you have to arrive at an estimated time complete your 1095-C forms.
Of course, if you have been using the HR software to track eligibility, employee status, which employees have accepted coverage and which have declined coverage, a lot of the work is already done. The HR software will compile this information and determine the codes to report for each month on the 1095-C. You should still be familiar with the codes, their meanings and under which situations they should be used.
Since this is the first year for 1095-C filing, we are recommending that customers manually review every form before filing to make sure it is accurate. Doing this (and documenting the fact) will should help demonstrate you made a good faith effort to accurately file your forms. We are planning on adding a button to the 1095-C entry/edit window for this purpose that will record the operator name, date and time stamp for the user that reviews/approves the form information for each employee.
If you have not been using the HR program all year, you have three choices:
- Reconstruct the coverage information that is needed to determine which employees had coverage during the year and add decline records for all employees that declined coverage. Set up and assign your employee categories and health plan information. The HR program should then have enough information to compile the 1095-C information.
- Set up employee categories and assign them to employee accounts so that the program can determine full time/part time status and fill out payroll related information on the 1095-C. You will then need to manually edit the 1095-C codes to add the coverage/decline information.
- Enter the codes for the 1095-C manually.
Keep in mind that the 1095-C functionality is a part of the Human Resource Management system, it will not be included in the Payroll module.