The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, requires certain employers to offer health insurance coverage to full-time employees and their dependents. In addition, those employers must send an annual statement to all employees eligible for coverage describing the insurance available to them. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) created Form 1095-C to serve as this annual statement.
The health care law defines which employers must offer health insurance to their workers. The law refers to them as “applicable large employers” or ALEs. A company is an ALE if it has at least 50 full-time workers or full-time equivalents. A full-time worker, according to the law, is someone who works at least 30 hours a week. Only ALEs are required to file Form 1095-C.
Every employee of an ALE who is eligible for insurance coverage should receive a 1095-C.
The 1095-C identifies the employee and the employer, which months during the year the employee was eligible for coverage, and the cost of the cheapest monthly premium the employee could have paid under the plan.
Form 1095-C (sent out by the employer) merely describes what coverage was made available to an employee. A separate form, the 1095-B (sent out by the insurance provider), provides details about an employee’s actual insurance coverage, including who in the worker’s family was covered (dependents).
Employers send the forms not only to their eligible employees but also to the IRS.
Employees are supposed to receive their forms by the end of January however, the IRS extended the deadline to deliver ACA reporting forms to employees from Jan. 31, 2017 to March 2, 2017.
The extended deadline applies to furnishing to individuals 2016 Form 1095-C (Employer-Provided Health Insurance Offer and Coverage) and Form 1095-B (Health Coverage).
Sources: Intuit TurboTax: What is Form 1095-C: Employer-Provided Health Insurance Offer and Coverage
