Several times each year, our small California company that
fluctuates between 100 to 110 employees is besieged by bureaucratic aliens.
They show up unannounced, flash us their badges after beaming down from their
mother ship, and then expect us to give them our immediate, unadulterated
attention as if our lives revolved around them. This year alone we have
had to entertain CAL-OSHA, the Dept. of Weights and Measures, the Board of
Equalization, various sheriffs and law enforcement agents, and mandatory
worker's comp auditors. Then there are mandatory reports that come
unsolicited in the mail and must be completed, typically in 15 to 30 days; the
Multiple Worksite Report every quarter; DOL time clock punch record audits; UI
audits; nosy creditors and student loan repos; garnishments; the Form 5500 for
the DOL; top-heavy testing for 401K; and the more uncommon but regularly
occurring U.S. Census.
I'm just getting started.
We haven't even broached the complexity required for a
corporate tax return. We are gearing up for that one, as we do every
year, using the long four-month runway to compile all the usual paperwork
requested by our accountant, who relies on the ornate nature of this government
insanity to retain his own sense of relevance. I don't want to travel
down this muddy yet familiar road of IRS humiliation. Over the last two
decades, it has anesthetized my ability to even give a damn anymore. I'm
numb.
So instead of going down that thrilling road, let's discuss
the new one, as boring as all this other hellishness is, and this new one is
particularly vile.
Last year was the first year of threatening employers with
penalties, fines, and fees (also known as taxes, notwithstanding
the Supreme Court), which caused us to scramble around like female leads in
horror movies dragging their bodies along the ground, trying to avoid the
hatchet man. We survived, kind of, because of phased in forbearance
allowing us to dodge a bullet, but we still lost a lot of blood in the form of
lost time.
This year was even worse. Most small businesses use
third-party payroll software to track the ACA, as opposed to big companies that
can afford custom in-house software. As the law has always been mutating
due to the fluctuating illegal whims of the D.C. junta, the confused software
has always been forced to second-guess these ongoing revisions. It's as
if Freud himself vomited up the mucus-filled egos of these morally sick
politicians, who think we were made to revolve around them as they laugh at
everyone not in their Democratic Party country club.
In the last three weeks alone, two of my highest
compensated employees spent their time going over every 1095C before it goes
into paper form and is mailed out. For each employee, there are three
stacks of cells for every month, 36 boxes that must be filled in correctly,
using over a dozen different codes. I'm not even in my business anymore.
I work for the government, against my will, along with two of my
employees. The three of us cannot afford to make one mistake in any of
the cells for all 100 employees. Thirty-six hundred codes must be checked
and verified before certification. That requires us to go over our
electronic paperwork and refer back to it. These papers, along with our
lovely new 1094, which goes directly to the IRS, form the leash around both our
necks as well as the necks of our employees, because they will be liable too for
fines based on the correct information we provide to them personally. It
is a hideous amount of time suck.
And that is just the end-of-year 1095s. I haven't
gotten into other aspects of this perverse law, such as the affordability as
well as the full- versus part-time ongoing monitoring of all staff that keeps
us spastically hyper-vigilant, not to mention exhausted from trying to avoid
fines by having constant discussions with employees nearing 30 hours. I'm
dating myself here, but it's like Logan's Run. If you hit 30,
you die.
Now we have higher churn, less loyalty among staff, less
full time, poorer training and less job satisfaction, and all for what?
To pretend that Obama was some great man when he's been the exact
opposite? This is a man who never intended to appreciate, or pretend to,
even for a minute, the effect this perverse control had over other lives.
He just flat-out ignored it, and caused bona fide suffering as well as lost
productivity. He doesn't have a legacy worth defending.
Thankfully, we are done. We are tired. Our
business could not continue this charade. And while its difficult still,
as California has uniquely chosen to signal off the White House with a
non-staggered pincer formation (minimum wages to $15, paid sick leave mandates,
etc.), at least Obamacare can die. Maybe California will choose to be
just as ideologically reactionary as Obama's easily bruised, frangible nature
and cram down a state Romneycare onto the entire coast, which would not be
entirely surprising, as it would be a spiteful thumb in Trump's eye. And
it would mean we would have to finally vacate the state once and for all.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/01/what_government_help_looks_like_on_the_front_lines.html#ixzz4UvIkmg6S
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