AIR on the side of caution—Pay attention to your AIR error messages

Applicable large employers are required to offer their employees minimum healthcare coverage and comply with the reporting requirements of the Affordable Care Act. But on March 31, employers may have been surprised to receive a message regarding an error with respect to an employee’s name and Social Security number (SSN) after submitting their 1094-C or 1095-C information to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). But what does this mean for employers, and are there any steps they should take to address these errors? Most definitely.

The error of ignoring AIR messages

Affordable Care Act Information Returns (AIR) error codes are remitted to employers after they submit their employees’ 1095-C filing information to the IRS. Once you’ve submitted this tax information, you may see its filing status as “accepted with errors.” You’ll then be prompted to download an error message that contains the codes, or reasons, for why the filed information contains errors.

After receiving and reviewing the AIR error message, you should review the message and determine the error as it pertains to an individual employee. The IRS may issue a variety of error codes. There may be one code in the message, however, that states an employee’s name and SSN don’t match the IRS’s records.