Obamacare may require volunteer fire departments to treat their firefighters as employees, which means the VFDs will have to provide health insurance or pay a fine, which means more Americans could be left without fire protection.
The fire chiefs are working with the Internal Revenue Service to resolve the situation.
The IRS now requires VFDs to issue W-2s for its volunteers, the fire chiefs group said in a fact sheet. That's because the relationship between a VFD and its volunteer firefighters meets the agency's criteria for being defined as an employee relationship.
Thus, if a VFD has 50 or more volunteers and other full-time workers, Obamacare's mandate applies. The rules also take into account part-time workers in a complicated formula that only government officials and human resources personnel can understand.
In two years, the fines will be $2,000 a year for each employee after the 30th employee, which may be cheaper for VFDs than providing health insurance -- but why should the IRS fine groups that are tax-exempt for not providing health insurance to volunteers?
Regardless of one's feelings toward Obamacare, everyone should agree that forcing VFDs to provide health insurance for volunteers is nutty.
