USPS Affordable Care Act Reporting Support
Overview:
The SSDT (State Software Development Team) is creating a USPS report to assist our users in determining if they have employees that will exceed 30 hours per week and therefore be classified as full time under the ACA (affordable care act).
This report will use the existing "retire hours" functionality built into the software to facilitate this tracking and reporting. Retire hours tracking was added several years ago due to a SERS requirement that these hours be tracked for employees reported to their retirement system. Even though this was specifically a SERS requirement we built into the software the flexibility to track these hours for all employees not just those reportable to SERS.
These hours can be configured in USPSCN/JOBSCN and will be automatically populated when an employee is pulled into a payroll via INICAL. You can also manually enter retirement hours when either adding or updating an employee in UPDCAL_CUR and UPDCAL_FUT.
In addition to the tracking accomplished via the payroll process adjustments to the calculated hour values are also possible using USPSCN/ATDSCN by entering an entry with a type of "AD" and a category of "RH".
As long as you are tracking these hours accurately for all employees we can then use them to report on and determine if an employee has exceeded 30 hours per week for the given measurement period.
The program will also take the employee's calendar start date into consideration. This will allow the program to calculate an average for someone whose first day of work is inside of a measurement period. If an employee has multiple calendar start dates on different jobs the earliest calendar start date will be used.
We believe this report will be very useful in getting you close to what you'll need in order to make administrative decisions on who is eligible for insurance benefits per the ACA.
Please Note: The program screenshots and sample reports included below are preliminary in nature. We are actively developing this report and these may change prior to the actual release of this application.
Report Interface:
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Report Options:
Print options page: Optionally include a summary of the selected options on the report.
Sort: Sort the report based on the selected option. Options include: employee id, employee name, or pay group.
Beginning Date: Enter the beginning date of your measurement period. In order for USPS to accurately accumulate the hours this should line up with the first period beginning date from the first payroll that you want included.
Ending Date: Enter the ending date of your measurement period. In order for USPS to accurately accumulate the hours this should line up with the last period ending date from the last payroll that you want included.
Exclude based on termination date?: If answered "Y" and an employee's BIOSCN termination date is prior to the ending date entered the employee will not be included on the report. This will allow you to optionally exclude terminated employees from the report since they would not be eligible for coverage per ACA rules.
Exclude employees with insurance?: If answered "Y" the program will exclude any employee that currently has a an active health insurance deduction. It will use the USPSDAT/DEDNAM "Include as employer-sponsored health coverage?:" flag to determine which deduction types to consider health insurance. A deduction will be considered active if the start date on the deduction is before the ending date entered and if the stop date on the deduction is after the ending date entered. A deduction is also considered active when no starting or ending date is present on the deduction.
Calendar for calculating breaks: Per the ACA any break of 4 or more weeks cannot be included in the counts used to determine if an employee has averaged 30 or more hours per week in a given measurement period. This prompt is an effort to support this rule. If you enter a calendar code it will use the given calendar to determine if there is a break stretching more than 27 days and will exclude these days from the calculated average. Any combination of 28 consecutive days with a blank, C (calamity), or H (holiday) on the calendar will be excluded. In theory you could create one or more calendars to be used specifically for this report.
Pay Groups: This prompt will allow the entry of up to 30 individual pay groups. If pay groups are entered only employees with jobs in these given pay groups will be included on the report.
Specific Employees: Up to 30 specific employees can be selected by entering their employee ids using this option (search by name popup help is included). Only the selected employees will be included on the report if this option is used.
Report Output:
The USPS affordable care report provides two reports as output: AFFORD.TXT and AFFORD.CSV.
AFFORD.TXT is a detail report that contains a break down by employee of how the number of hours was calculated. It provides information about whether the hours came from the payroll history or were accumulated from AD RH ATDSCN postings. It also provides a per employee total of this information. In addition it provides a "total employees exceeding 30 hours" count at the bottom of the report. This will provide you with an estimate of the number of employees included on the report that exceed 30 hours a week on average.
AFFORD.CSV is a comma separated report that can be viewed / modified using a spreadsheet program such as Excel. It provides one entry per employee, which summarizes each employee. The CSV file contains the following fields: employee id, last name, first name, middle initial, total hours calculated for the measurement period, the start date used for counting this employee, the stop date used for counting this employee, the total number of days in the period, the total number of weeks in the period, the average hours per week calculated, and a flag signifying if the employee's average exceeds 30 hours per week.
AFFORD.TXT Example:
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AFFORD.CSV Example:
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