Travis Software Official Blog

A new burden imposed on certain employers by the Health Care Reform act (PPACA) is the requirement to report the cost of group health coverage on an employee’s IRS Form W-2, including that of former employees who enroll in COBRA continuation coverage. This new disclosure is required only for employers that prepare more than 250 W-2s for the preceding calendar year and is solely for informational purposes to provide employees with useful and comparable consumer information on the cost of their health care coverage. This requirement begins for 2012 Form W-2s, which are to be provided to employees/former employees on or before January 31, 2013.

IRS recently issued new guidance on this requirement (IRS Notice 2012-9), and Travis is currently working through this guidance to create a new report for both TravisCobra and WebCOBRA On Demand to provide employers and administrators with this newly needed group health benefit cost information.

Hello again, and welcome back to Tuesday Tips! This month’s edition takes you step-by-step through the process of entering retroactive information in both our WebCOBRA and TravisCobra systems.

Occasionally, you might need to enter Participants into your system that have previously been on COBRA coverage and administered outside of WebCOBRA or TravisCobra. For instance, this could be the case in the event of a “Takeover” where a third-party administrator has gained a new client who was either administering COBRA for themselves or with another administrator previously.