The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has released IRS Notice 2019-63, which provides a 30-day automatic extension to furnish to employees/covered individuals the 2019 IRS Forms 1095-B (Health Coverage) and 1095-C (Employer-Provided Health Insurance Offer and Coverage) from January 31, 2020 to March 2, 2020. This extension is similar to the extension issued in earlier years and does not impact the deadline to furnish transmittal Forms 1094-C and 1094-B and copies of the individual forms to the IRS. The deadline to file these forms remains February 28, 2020 (March 31, 2020, if filing electronically).
The notice also provides limited relief for employers subject to the employer mandate, which allows them to not furnish forms to certain individuals (such as certain COBRA participants, retirees, and part-time employees) provided the employer posts a prominent notice on its website indicating a copy of the form is available upon request. This relief does not impact the obligation to file forms with the IRS and might not be worth the administrative hassle unless mailing a large number of forms can be avoided.
Finally, the notice also extends relief from penalties related to incorrect or incomplete filings where the filing entity can show that it made a good-faith effort to comply with the filing requirements. In general, good-faith relief is not available if filings are not made or are made late.
It is worth noting that the forms themselves are basically unchanged from last year, despite the fact that information relative to the individual mandate (generally the detailed information in Part III of Form 1095-C) was rendered moot by the elimination of the individual mandate penalty for 2019 and later years. Please contact the authors or your Morgan Lewis contact for more information or if you have questions.