Keith McMurdy was quoted in the Bloomberg Business Week article, "Feds to Employers: You Can't Dump Sick Workers onto Obamacare." Full text can be found in the December 5, 2014, issue, but a synopsis is below.

Officials became aware that some employers planned to bypass the Affordable Care Act's insurance mandate by giving out bonuses, requesting that workers decline company-sponsored insurance and sending them to the Obamacare marketplaces to buy subsidized policies.

"Brokers were running around selling this idea that employers could give everybody a raise and say, 'Go, get the tax credit, knock yourselves out,' and they wouldn't pay a penalty. Go figure—the IRS got wise to that," explained Keith McMurdy.

The majority of businesses with more than 50 employees already provide insurance, but there were business owners planning to give employees raises and send them to state or federal individual insurance marketplaces, McMurdy states.

When asked how many companies thought they could take advantage of the loophole McMurdy replied with, "More than I anticipated based on the feedback I got. You cannot believe the number of people who called me" after a newsletter in which he wrote about the guidelines was published. "It was like, 'Holy c––– —this screws up my whole plan!'"

So why is there so much effort trying to skirt the mandate? McMurdy has asked the same question at the seminars he does for New York and New Jersey business owners. "There's been a lot of resistance because they're starting from the proposition that this mandate will kill them. I tell people if they spent as much time figuring out how to comply as they did avoiding compliance, they wouldn't have an issue."

Originally published by Bloomberg Business Week.

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