New to the forum and found this thread of particular interest since I am currently in the midst of attempting to transition my family and I out of my former employer's Cobra plan and onto the ACA starting in Jan 2018. Expecting a big AGI drop in 2018 as I transition into my new life away from my former Mega Corp. comp package into a life of dividends and interest. I'm waiting to see how that goes once they complete my application which was finally successfully submitted online yesterday. Good to see others have had success submitting written letters explaining income variances when questioned!
Want to share one very annoying thing that occurred during the online application process that may help others. Once you've successfully setup your .Gov login and PW, and confirmed it via the confirmation email they send, you begin the application process by fully confirming you are who you claim to be. SS#, birthday, etc... The system would never let me pass this initial step even though my info was valid and correct. It kept stating it couldn't find me and my verification had failed. I called the ACA service phone line and they walked me through it only to have it fail again. Once you fail the online verification process multiple times you receive a screen with a unique code and instructions to contact Experian for further assistance. The ACA agent was nice enough to stay on the line and conference Experian into our call so we could all try it together. As we were waiting to speak with an Experian agent it suddenly occurred to me that I had frozen my credit reports through all three major agencies, including Experian, a few weeks back once news of the big Equifax hack was made public. The Experian agent came on the line and took his shot and failed as well verifying my info. When I asked about my credit freeze with them he finally admitted that was indeed what was stopping me from verifying my identity on the ACA website.
The ACA agent then advised me on how to submit online proof docs through their site (in this case a photo of my drivers license..) which finally allowed me to successfully complete the online application process. I will now wait 7 to 10 days to find out if they have any further issues with this identity challenge or not. I imagine my drivers license will work but we shall see.
Still baffles me how a government run agency chooses to utilize an outside credit reporting agency when they should have full access to IRS records! (which they will view later anyway to confirm income eligibility next year..) I had to pay Experian to freeze my credit reports when Equifax was hacked even though I never asked them to gather and store that info for me in the first place but that's a topic for another time.
Thought I'd throw this info into the mix in case anyone else chose to freeze their Experian reporting and run into this online ACA identity confirmation issue.
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