Since when? The Employer Mandate was designed to do precisely that. Of course, on the other hand, Barack Obama unconstitutionally delayed the unconstitutional Employer Mandate of the unconstitutional Unaffordable Care-Less Act for a year and doubtless will again, so there shouldn't be any penalty at all for employers "dumping" their employees into the exchanges, whether or not they reimburse them for their ObamaCare premiums.
So either the IRS didn't get that particular memo, or the IRS is going rogue, or Red Barry didn't really mean it about deferring the Employer Mandate, or he's just asleep at the 'prompter again:
The Internal Revenue Service has ruled that employers cannot hand tax-free contributions to their workers and tell them to purchase health insurance, the New York Times reported.
Employers who try dumping employees into the healthcare exchanges to avoid having to pay for their coverage are now on notice that the practice is prohibited. Employers who circumvent the law are subject to a $100 a day tax penalty, the newspaper said.
The [Una]ffordable Care[-Less] Act requires large employers to provide healthcare coverage to their full-time workers. Some companies figured it was less expensive to give each employee money to purchase their own coverage on an exchange rather than providing coverage through group policies.
The ruling comes as a blow to many employers who gave their workers tax-free cash contributions to purchase coverage.
Forgive me, but what difference is there between an ObamaCare-compliant employer plan and an ObamaCare-compliant individual plan for which your employer reimburses you? Either way, the employee and dependents are in an ObamaCare-compliant plan, yes? Indeed, since the individual market has already been destroyed, it's group-market plans that are more like to not be ObamaCare-compliant, so one would think that "dumping" from employer plans would increase the chances of more Americans being forced into an ObamaCare-compliant plan. Yet the IRS is going to hit such employers with an annualized fine of over thirty six grand per employee for doing what they've always done?:
The ruling comes as a blow to many employers who gave their workers tax-free cash contributions to purchase coverage. Andrew Biebl, a tax partner at CliftonLarsonAllen in Minneapolis, said the idea of giving workers money to buy their own insurance preceded ObamaCare.
"For decades, employers have been assisting employees by reimbursing them for health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs," Biebl told the Times. "The new federal ruling eliminates many of those arrangements by imposing an unusually punitive penalty."...
The IRS says so-called employer payment plans — when a company reimburses a worker for premiums — do not satisfy the requirements of the [Una]ffordable Care[-Less] Act which mandate that specified preventive services be offered without co-payments, the Times reported.
Well. Guess that answers that question. So employers - large ones, at least - have no choice, other than bankruptcy. For them, the IRS has reinstated the Employer Mandate The One had deferred. Or they did what he wanted done on his behalf but didn't want to take the heat for. Just one more example added to dozens and hundreds of them why nobody can nor ought to trust a single word that comes out of the mouth of Barack Hussein Obama ever again.
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