The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires applicable large employers (ALEs) to offer affordable, minimum-value health coverage to their full-time employees (and dependents) or risk paying a penalty to the IRS. This employer mandate is also known as the“pay-or-play” rules. An ALE is an employer with at least 50 full-time employees, including full-time equivalent employees,during the preceding calendar year.
Because an employer generally will not know an employee’s household income, the IRS has provided three optional safe harbors that ALEs may use to determine affordability based on information that is available to them: the Form W-2 safe harbor, the rate-of-pay safe harbor and the federal poverty line (FPL) safe harbor