There is a familiar pattern in the PCORI filing world. Every spring, compliance teams pull up last year’s spreadsheet, track down updated enrollment numbers, verify the current fee rate, manually build Schedule B, coordinate an EFTPS payment separately, and hope nothing slips through the cracks. The process works, more or less, until it doesn’t.
A missed client. A misapplied rate. A payment that went through without a return. A return that went out without a payment. An IRS CP162 notice arriving in October for something that could have been avoided in June.
The tools most organizations are using for PCORI compliance were not built for PCORI compliance. They are generic spreadsheets, repurposed document templates, and disconnected payment systems that were assembled into a workflow because nothing purpose-built existed when the obligation started. That has changed. And the organizations that continue relying on outdated processes are not just working harder than they need to. They are carrying risk that a modern software platform eliminates entirely.
This post breaks down the most common pain points in legacy PCORI filing workflows, explains exactly how purpose-built software addresses each one, and makes the case for why switching is not just a convenience decision but a risk management decision.
Pain Point 1: Manually Tracking the Annual Rate Change
Every year in the fall, the IRS publishes a new IRS Notice updating the PCORI fee rate. Every year, organizations using manual workflows have to find that Notice, verify the new rate, and update every spreadsheet, template, and calculation that references the prior year’s figure.
This sounds trivial until it is not. The $3.84 rate that applies to plan years ending October through December 2025 is $0.37 higher than the prior year’s $3.47. For an organization with 1,000 covered lives, using the wrong rate underpays the fee by $370 and creates an amended return situation. For a TPA managing 40 clients, a single bad rate lookup can cascade into 40 incorrect filings.
How Akore Federal fixes this: The platform automatically applies the correct IRS-published rate based on the plan year end date entered for each client or filing. There is no manual lookup, no spreadsheet update, and no risk of a stale rate being applied. When the IRS publishes a new rate, Akore Federal updates it. Your filings are always current.
Pain Point 2: Spreadsheets That Do Not Scale
A spreadsheet is a reasonable tool for one filing. It becomes a liability at five, a management challenge at twenty, and an operational risk at fifty.
TPAs and benefits administrators managing PCORI for multiple employer clients face a scaling problem that spreadsheets were never designed to solve. Each client has a different plan year end date, a different covered lives count, a different EIN, and a different filing status. Tracking all of that in a shared spreadsheet means version control issues, formula errors, and no clear audit trail when something goes wrong.
The organizations that have been using these workflows for years have often built elaborate systems to manage them. Those systems work until a key person leaves, a file gets corrupted, or a deadline slips during a busy quarter.
How Akore Federal fixes this: The multi-client dashboard gives TPAs and administrators a single interface where every employer client is managed separately, with its own EIN, plan year, covered lives data, filing status, and confirmation record. No spreadsheets, no version control, no shared files. Filing status for every client is visible at a glance, and the system flags deadlines before they become problems.
Pain Point 3: The Filing and Payment Disconnect
Form 720 requires both a filed return and a separate EFTPS payment. These are two distinct actions in the manual workflow, and the gap between them is where the most common and most avoidable IRS notices originate.
Filing without paying produces a failure-to-deposit notice. Paying without filing produces a failure-to-file notice. Paying the wrong amount because the rate was wrong produces an underpayment notice. Each of these triggers IRS correspondence, requires a response, and creates administrative burden that dwarfs the original fee amount for smaller plans.
Organizations using manual workflows have to manage these two steps separately, often with different team members responsible for each, and with no system-level confirmation that both were completed correctly for every client.
How Akore Federal fixes this: The filing and payment workflow is integrated into a single submission process. When you submit through Akore Federal, the return and payment are coordinated in one workflow. The IRS returns an electronic acknowledgment confirming receipt of both, giving you a timestamped compliance record that requires no follow-up.
Pain Point 4: No Audit Trail When the IRS Comes Asking
The IRS has a three-year statute of limitations on excise tax returns, and PCORI audits happen. When they do, the organization needs to produce documentation of how the covered lives figure was derived, which calculation method was used, what rate was applied, when the return was filed, and when payment was received.
In a manual workflow, that documentation is scattered across spreadsheets, email chains, EFTPS payment confirmations, and PDF filings stored in various locations by various team members. Reconstructing it under audit pressure is time-consuming and stressful, and gaps in the record are difficult to explain.
How Akore Federal fixes this: Every filing completed through Akore Federal generates a complete, retrievable audit record. The covered lives calculation, the applied rate, the Schedule B detail, the IRS submission confirmation, and the payment record are all stored together and accessible at any time. If the IRS sends a notice two years after a filing, your entire compliance record is one login away.
Pain Point 5: Outdated Software That Has Not Kept Up with IRS Changes
The PCORI fee has been updated, extended, and modified multiple times since it was first established under the Affordable Care Act. The Further Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2020 extended it through 2029. Fee rates have changed every year. HRA rules have evolved with the introduction of ICHRAs in 2020 and ongoing IRS guidance updates. Form 720 itself is revised annually.
Organizations relying on compliance software built five or more years ago may be working with tools that have not kept pace with these changes. Outdated rate tables, stale form versions, and missing HRA-specific logic are not theoretical risks. They are the documented source of real IRS notices that real organizations have had to respond to.
How Akore Federal fixes this: Akore Federal was built as a software-first company, with development driven directly by customer feedback and the real-world pain points of TPAs, benefits administrators, and employer clients. The platform is updated continuously as IRS guidance evolves, form revisions are released, and rate changes are published. You are never filing on last year’s rules.
Pain Point 6: Wasted Staff Time on a Repeatable Process
The PCORI fee is the same filing, every year, for the same clients, on the same deadline. It is one of the most predictable compliance obligations in the benefits space. Yet organizations using manual workflows treat it as a project that has to be rebuilt from scratch each filing season.
Tracking down enrollment data. Verifying rates. Building Schedule B. Coordinating payments. Following up on confirmations. For a TPA with 50 clients, this can consume days of staff time that could be spent on higher-value work.
How Akore Federal fixes this: Because Akore Federal stores client data, plan year information, and prior filing history, the annual PCORI filing cycle becomes a fraction of the work it was before. Client data carries forward, rates update automatically, and the platform guides each filing to completion in minutes rather than hours. The time savings compound with every client added to the platform.
The Bigger Picture: Compliance Software as a Risk Management Tool
The organizations that view PCORI compliance software as a cost are comparing it to the cost of the manual workflow they already have in place. The more relevant comparison is the cost of getting it wrong.
An IRS CP162 penalty for a late excise tax deposit is 2 percent of the unpaid amount for deposits one to five days late, escalating to 10 percent for deposits more than 15 days late, and 15 percent for amounts still unpaid more than 10 days after the first IRS notice. For a mid-sized self-insured employer or a TPA managing multiple clients, the penalty exposure from a single filing error can significantly exceed the annual cost of a purpose-built compliance platform.
That calculation changes the framing. Moving from a spreadsheet-based workflow to Akore Federal is not a technology upgrade. It is a risk reduction decision that pays for itself the first time it prevents an IRS notice.
Built on Technology You Can Trust
Akore Federal is a software-first company. Every feature in the platform was built in direct response to customer feedback and the documented pain points of compliance professionals who had been making manual workflows function through discipline and effort rather than through design.
The platform is built on a foundation of enterprise-grade compliance infrastructure and is proud to be an exclusive partner of Thomson Reuters, one of the most trusted names in tax and legal information. That partnership reflects a shared commitment to accuracy, reliability, and compliance confidence that individual employers and large TPAs alike can rely on.
If your current PCORI process depends on a spreadsheet, a PDF template, and two separate logins to get one return filed, you already know what needs to change.
See how Akore Federal works at AkoreFederal.com.
Ready to replace your manual PCORI workflow with a platform built for the way compliance professionals actually work? Contact the Akore Federal team for a demonstration or explore our TPA and employer resources at AkoreFederal.com.
