Summary: The Obama Administration has taken an axe to the Affordable Care Act, after finally admitting that it is too complex to implement. The move to delay the employer mandate appears to be illegal on its face. It is also further redundant proof that Obamacare must be repealed. As announced in a post on the Treasury blog, the administration, through the IRS, is delaying the implementation of "reporting requirements", leading to a one-year suspension of the mandate that employers provide health insurance to their full-time employees. The announcement was leaked to two reporters from Bloomberg News, and was originally scheduled to be made the eve of the July 4th federal holiday. With the President out of the country and available to comment only to captive White House correspondents, that would assure the minimum news coverage. The leak forced the posting from former IRS employee Assistant Treasury Secretary for Tax Policy Mark Mazur: The Administration is announcing that it will provide an additional year before the ACA mandatory employer and insurer reporting requirements begin. A release from Congressman Steve King of Iowa explains the first problem with that sentence: If President Obama wants to make changes to ObamaCare, he must come to Congress," said King. "Two years ago, the Obama Administration, through a memo from a Homeland Security Department bureaucrat, declared it would not enforce our nation's immigration laws. Now the Obama Administration, through a blog post by an Assistant Secretary in the Treasury Department, is declaring it won't even enforce its own health care law on employers. We live in a Constitutional Republic. We are a nation governed by laws written by Congress, not memos and blog posts written by bureaucrats.Though Rep King stops short of saying so, this change exceeds Administration's authority (more on that below). Back to the blog post written by the bureaucrat:This is designed to meet two goals. First, it will allow us to consider ways to simplify the new reporting requirements consistent with the law. Second, it will provide time to adapt health coverage and reporting systems while employers are moving toward making health coverage affordable and accessible for their employees. That is an admission that both the implementation and the design of Obamacare are too burdensome for American business. If you have to simplify the procedures you just created, that means you overreached and made a mess of things. And after three years, if you still haven't been able to "adapt health coverage and reporting systems" to the new law, it means that Obamacare's basic design is too complex and heavy-handed ever to accomplish its goals.Within the next week, we will publish formal guidance describing this transition. Just like the Administration’s effort to turn the initial 21-page application for health insurance into a three-page application, we are working hard to adapt and to be flexible about reporting requirements as we implement the law. No, this is not just like simplifying the health insurance application to 3 pages from 21. That was a minor change which, though embarrassing, had no further impact. This wreaks havoc on the structure of the entire law, and requires Congressional authority to perform.But why could the government think it's legal?Here is some additional detail. The ACA includes information reporting (under section 6055) by insurers, self-insuring employers, and other parties that provide health coverage. It also requires information reporting (under section 6056) by certain employers with respect to the health coverage offered to their full-time employees. What does Section 6055 of the US Code (created by Obamacare section 1502) say?‘‘SEC. 6055. REPORTING OF HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE. ‘‘(a) IN GENERAL.—Every person who provides minimum essential coverage to an individual during a calendar year shall, at&n
