MNsure vows to send tardy tax forms by week's end

MNsure officials said Wednesday that they have sent about 10,000 tax forms to health exchange customers in the past week, and will have the final batch of late documents in the mail by week's end.

People who buy private health insurance through MNsure need the forms to complete their taxes by April 18, and MNsure failed to meet a Feb. 1 deadline for generating all the documents.

Last week, MNsure was only 69 percent finished with the job of creating more than 43,000 tax forms, leaving more than 13,000. On Wednesday, MNsure officials said the job is now 93 percent done, with about 3,000 forms to go.

"The small remainder will be sent by the end of this week," state officials wrote in a Wednesday letter to legislators. "The progress achieved is the result of an automated solution and contingency options that were implemented by MNsure and MN.IT staff in order to expedite the distribution of these forms.

"While all forms are now on track to be mailed, MNsure and MN.IT take full responsibility for not achieving Minnesotans' expectations," they wrote. "We apologize for the stress and frustration this delay has caused those individuals awaiting Form 1095-A."

The tax forms allow MNsure users to reconcile the value of tax credits they should have received in 2015 with the actual subsidies they used for health insurance last year.

On Wednesday morning, a committee in the state House of Representatives approved a bill that would provide financial compensation to MNsure customers who have had to wait for the forms. The measure from Rep. Greg Davids, R-Preston, would pay affected individuals $10 for each day their 1095-A tax form was late after Feb. 1, and $50 for each day that passes without a form beyond the April 18 filing deadline.

"They didn't do anything wrong, and they're going to be penalized because of MNsure's total and complete incompetence," Davids said in an interview. The bill next goes to the House Committee on Ways and Means.

MNsure doesn't have an official position on the legislation, said Allison O'Toole, the MNsure chief executive, in an interview. But it could take a significant chunk of money. A fiscal note for the legislation estimates payments would total $13.5 million.

For a two-week stretch in mid-March, MNsure produced only about 1,600 tax forms. But the exchange picked up the pace considerably in the past week, O'Toole said, thanks to a new contingency system for generating documents.

In terms of automation, the new contingency system is somewhere between MNsure's new fully automated process, which failed to handle the job, and the stopgap manual process that MNsure started using about two weeks ago.

"We're very close to completion on this," O'Toole said. "We will have the forms to them with ample time to file."

Christopher Snowbeck • 612-673-4744