More Americans than expected opted out of the individual insurance mandate, including some who didn't even have to.
About 6.6 million people filed federal tax returns with an individual shared responsibility payment, according to the Internal Revenue Service's National Taxpayer Advocate report on 2014. That's about 10 percent more than the Obama Administration predicted, as Bloomberg reported.
While the IRS report did not disclose how much the fines raised in total, the average penalty, called the ISRP, was $190, being as much as much as 1 percent of income.
The IRS also found that 300,000 citizens overpaid by an average of $110 and with a collective $35 million. (The agency isn't sure whether those consumers will get refunds). Meanwhile, about 10.7 million taxpayers filed a form 8965 for a health coverage exemption.
All in all, wrote National Taxpayer Advocate chief Nina E. Olson, the IRS's administration of the Affordable Care Act has "gone well," with only "some glitches."
On tax returns processed through the end of April, Americans filed about 2.6 million claims for the premium tax credit (form 8962) in either 2014 or 2015. The average amount in premium tax credits was $3,000.
Overall, the health plan subsidy system has worked, with some exceptions, Olson said. One issue was that some exchanges "made errors on forms 1095-A, leading to an IRS resolution to reduce taxpayer burden." That left about 800,000 consumers briefly in limbo, as they waited to complete corrected forms before filing a tax return.
There were a number of other problems that cropped up, noted the National Taxpayer Advocate report.
"The Vermont state exchange portal was down for approximately two months during open enrollment and the exchange delayed processing change-in-circumstances submissions," Olson wrote.
Also, "Unscrupulous preparers improperly calculated the ISRP and instructed the taxpayers to pay the ISRP amounts directly to the preparers," she wrote, and some tax preparers "did not properly claim ISRP exemptions for noncitizen taxpayers."
In some cases, the IRS found that tax prepares were adding the penalty to returns for undocumented immigrants instead of checking off their exemption. In other cases, the preparer altered the return by incorrectly adding (premium tax credits) without the taxpayer's knowledge and pocketed the incremental amount," Olson wrote.