Passport Software’s ACA Solutions – Customer Trends
Hello again,
This post is for Applicable Large Employers (ALEs) required to comply with the Affordable Care Act. We hope you find it useful.
The following information came from a conversation with Marti, our ACA Customer Care Specialist, about current trends in the types of ACA compliance challenges that have come up in recent calls.
About a year ago, we were hearing from people who had not been filing and were receiving penalty letters from the IRS with exorbitant penalties.
We were able to help many of those companies to reduce or completely avoid the penalties.
However, now it seems like most companies are aware of the mandate to comply and file, and we’re seeing some new trends.
HR Benefits Providers
Lately, we’ve seen an uptrend in our work with various types of HR benefits providers.
The HR benefits companies tell us they want to provide their clients with ACA services, but many accountants don’t want to deal with ACA support because of its complexity or the liability – ACA compliance management services can be a “consultative beast” was one comment.
For instance, recently we began helping a big HR benefits company that provides most of their clients’ payroll services. We are going to help many of their clients they serve with our proxy filing and ACA Full Service.
Another insurance and benefits company has established a relationship with us, just in case their clients need ACA services. That is being proactive!
We’re also seeing more calls from HR service providers who want to find a reliable company to whom they can refer their clients.
One insurance and benefits provider shared that they were having a hard time finding a reliable ACA Services provider until they contacted us. The company they used before is currently out of business.
Another HR services provider called us when they had been forced to cut ties with their ACA services company because they had their prices raised, changed their policy, and began reaching out to the HR customers directly without involving the HR services provider.
Affordability
We recently began working with a company that has never filed. We are assisting them to get caught up on past years – we just completed 2018 filing for them, and are working on their 2019 filing. They purchased our ACA software, and we are proxy filing for them.
But this year there has not been as big of a surge of last-minute or late filers as past years, but from our conversations, we are hearing that many ACA services are more expensive than we are, for less assistance.
A well-known payroll services provider is very expensive, and their customers do most of the work themselves.
Though payroll service providers can be expensive when including ACA compliance support, these providers get the job done, so many companies stick with this type of expensive solution.
What Differentiates Us
What makes us so good, in addition to our pricing and customer service, is that our IRS-certified ACA software is very intuitive.
People think they may have a lot of work to do to get started, but we use a simple Employee Import Template which makes things extremely easy. Just create an excel spreadsheet with basic employee information and import it into our ACA software.
And, our software assumes certain things: If an employee is full-time, then it issues a notification that you should offer insurance, or if an employee resigns, it no longer calculates future months so you won’t have to file for that employee.
Some of our clients prefer the ACA Software option to manage their compliance on their own, but we serve a variety of customer preferences. Benefits companies, late filers, and penalty relief consultations seem to prefer our Full Service option.
This year we are really seeing an uptick in customers preferring to use our ACA Reporting Services. These include our ACA Full Service option, and our optional proxy submission for which we are IRS-approved to file on behalf of our software customers.
Many of our customers compliment us on our effort to provide concierge-level customer service. Contact us to learn more – we are here to help.