IRS starts to enforce employer mandate

As Republicans and the Trump administration continue trying to chip away at the Affordable Care Act, the Internal Revenue Service has begun, for the first time, to enforce one of the law’s most-polarizing provisions: the employer mandate.

Thousands of businesses — many of them small or midsize — will soon receive a letter saying that they owe the government money because they failed to offer their workers qualifying health insurance. The first round of notices, which the IRS began sending in late October, are being mailed to companies that have at least 100 fulltime employees and ran afoul of the law in 2015, the year that the mandate took effect.

Large companies, defined in the law as those with 50 or more workers, are required to offer their employees affordable insurance or pay stiff tax penalties. The IRS held off for years on assessing those fines, saying that it needed more time, and money, to build its compliance systems.

Now, the agency says it is finally ready to go after scofflaws.

‘‘As the IRS has publicly stated, the agency is obligated to enforce the Affordable Care Act’s employer sharedresponsibility provision,’’ said Bruce Friedland, an agency spokesman.

Ten months ago, in his first executive order, President Donald Trump directed government agencies to waive, defer or delay carrying out as much of the law as possible. This week, the Treasury Department said that it objected to the employer mandate but was legally compelled to enforce it.

The employer mandate is lucrative for the government. It is expected to bring in penalty payments of $207 billion over the next decade, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office.

When the health law was passed, lawmakers feared that without an employer mandate, companies would cancel their insurance benefits and send large numbers of employees to the law’s insurance exchanges.