Applicable large employers faced with the prospect of complying with the Affordable Care Acts employer shared responsibility rules must grapple with and understand what it means to make an offer of minimum essential coverage under an eligible employer-sponsored [group health] plan to their full-time employees.
Final regulations implementing these rules determine an individuals status as an employee by applying the common law standard, the contours of which were examined in a previous post. Identifying an employers common law employees in a two-party arrangement is a simple matter. But this is not always the case in three-party arrangements (i.e., those in which workers are hired from or through commercial staffing firms or professional employer organizations). Three-party arrangements invite the questionwhose employee is it? Where the Acts employer shared responsibility rules are concerned, the answer to that question tells us which entity must make the requisite offer of coverage when assessing exposure for assessable payments.
