Roger Baker, Gilpin County Manager.   Difficult though it is to believe (or tolerate), the 2016 presidential campaign is obviously underway, with a dozen or so declared candidates and the promise (threat?) of more to come.

And the various campaign kickoffs, stump speeches, policy papers, and preliminary polls have made it clear that the Affordable Care Act (ACA, sometimes referred to as Obamacare) will be very much an issue despite the recent Supreme Court decisions affirming key parts of the legislation.

Interestingly, the concerns expressed about ACA are now coming from both sides of the ideological spectrum, from those who say this sort of government-mandated health care goes too far, to others who say it doesn’t go far enough.

Some readers may be familiar with the recent activities of our own former County Commissioner (and State Senator) Jeanne Nicholson, who is working with a group trying to get a single-payer healthcare system on the ballot for consideration by Colorado voters.

Despite all these proposed changes, the ACA is now the settled law of the land, and it’s up to those of us in local government to make sure we are doing what needs to be done to stay in compliance.

To this point, that effort has mostly involved getting uninsured residents to sign up for health insurance, and our local health care guide, Debby Henkens, has been tireless in working with Gilpinites to get on board with coverage; that fact that there are actually financial penalties for failing to do so probably makes her job a little easier.

But there are also things Gilpin County as an employer has to do for its employees, and the consequences of some of those mandates (there are both individual and employer mandates) were discussed at the July 14 meeting of the Board of County Commissioners.

Specifically, the reporting requirements that begin in 2016 through what is called the “ACA Information Return” system (or AIR) are “significantly more complex than simply uploading a PDF file containing the pertinent information,” as the County’s insurance broker explained it.

What’s more, a companion piece of legislation called Trade Preferences Extension Act of 2015, and a pair of new Internal Revenue System codes prescribe hefty fees for employers who fail to comply with these reporting procedures.

Faced with this additional workload, the County’s Human Resources and Finance departments looked at options for completing and submitting the necessary reporting, including software upgrades to the existing HR and/or Finance systems, or contracting out the work to a third party.

None of these options is perfect, and none is free. But considering that the fines for failure to comply are significant, it made sense to at least explore the possibilities before moving ahead and hiring additional staff—which also comes with a considerable cost—to try to deal with the requirements in house.

So in the end, the Commissioners decided on the option that will have the greatest upfront cost—about $5,000 for the rest of this year, and about $11,700 annually—but will hopefully prove the least demanding on staff time. It’s essentially an upgrade to the existing HR computer recordkeeping system.

It’s frustrating to all—the Commissioners and these two department heads—how little their computer systems work with each other. We experience much the same sort of frustration in dealing with land and property tax records, where the Assessor, Clerk & Recorder, and Treasurer deal with much the same data, but in very different (and hence unsharable) formats.

Computers are wonderful, and we couldn’t provide the services we need to our County residents without them. But boy, they can cost a lot of money…