Outsourcing the ACA transmission is too expensive

If you are trying to find someone to transmit your ACA data because you don’t know how to do xml, it may be very expensive. We were looking into having someone do the conversion and transmission of data in case I don’t figure it out and it turns out the price is too steep. The quote was $25K. For a small company, that’s too much.

So it’s down to me to figure it out. Right now, it appears that I have figured it out, up through validating my manifest file and the data form through a validator, Notepad xml. I compared against the government’s xsd files or schema files and it looks like I finally got through with no errors.

For me to be really comfortable, I must pass through both 1) the testing phase in AIR (the government system that is being used to electronically upload the data – we’re going to use the UI channel) and 2) actual transmission of data. I’ll be fine if I get to the point where the only errors are related to the name/SSN combination not being found in the government site. At that point, I will know that I have successfully done the transmission and all we have left to do is figure out the name/SSN problems, which will probably be more of somebody else’s problem. I will still care about it because I want to make the transmission go all the way through but at least I know I am not the source of the problem.

Right now it’s raining really hard (the real kind) and we’re supposed to flood tomorrow. Hopefully I will be able to get into work tomorrow and see how the Monday report goes. Meanwhile I better get off the computer.