Treasury Dept. to 50K who used botched ACA tax form: "Eh, to heck with it...keep the change"

Remember last week when the HHS Dept. announced that someone had sent out 800,000 screwed-up 1095-A tax forms? Those are the ones that those receiving ACA tax credits have to fill out to make sure that they don't have to pay anything back (or, conversely, that the IRS doesn't owe them a higher subsidy).

Out of around 4 million of these forms sent out nationally, about 20% (800K) had some sort of error regarding the benchmark policy used to calculate their correct subsidy. Of those 800K, about 50,000 people had already filed their 2014 taxes before the error was found, and originally the Treasury Dept. had said that they were going to contact each of those 50K to resolve the issue.

Today, it looks like they've basically said, "aw...screw it; too much trouble":

WASHINGTON — Taxpayers who've filed their 2014 returns only to learn that the government provided them with erroneous information on health care subsidies won't be required to submit corrected returns, the Treasury Department said Tuesday.

The decision amounts to a reprieve for an estimated 50,000 early filers out of a pool of some 800,000 HealthCare.gov customers affected by a tax reporting error disclosed last week.

Apparently they crunched the numbers and decided that in the end, the amount that was owed tothe IRS was pretty much cancelled out by the amount owed to the filers...

A senior Treasury official said the government determined that the errors are not significant enough to require taxpayers to refile returns already submitted. "We think lots of these are relatively small dollar-amount errors," said official, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of the official announcement.

Some of the mistakes favor the government, and others favor the taxpayer, but Treasury officials believe it's basically a wash. "It's symmetric," the official said.

...so they decided to eat whatever the loss was at their end, but are still allowing people to go ahead and refile if they think that the IRS owes them a higher subsidy:

People can check by logging in to their accounts at HealthCare.gov, where they should find a message indicating whether they were affected or not. They also can check by phoning the federal customer service center at 800-318-2596.