ACA compliance is operational work.
We’re the practitioners who do it.
A firm built around the principle that compliance isn’t a software problem to solve once — it’s ongoing operational work that demands experienced hands every filing season.
A firm built around the work itself.
ACA compliance is one of the most consequential reporting obligations an employer has, and it’s one of the most consistently mishandled. The penalties are real, the IRS letters are real, and the deadlines don’t move. PenaltyShield exists because employers facing those obligations need more than a portal and a deadline reminder. They need practitioners who understand the regulation, do the work, and stand by the result. That’s the firm we built.
Four commitments we don’t compromise on.
These aren’t aspirations. They’re how every engagement at PenaltyShield is run.
We file directly with the IRS.
No third-party transmitters between our work and the federal government. We hold our own TCC and submit through the IRS AIR system ourselves. When something goes wrong with a transmission, we’re the ones who can fix it.
Every return is reviewed before it leaves our office.
No filing goes out without a practitioner reviewing it end-to-end. The same standard applies to every client, regardless of size. Automation supports the work; it doesn’t replace the judgment behind it.
We do the work end-to-end.
Clients send us their data. We handle everything after — normalization, compliance analysis, federal and state filings, employee form distribution, and IRS correspondence. There’s no “you’ll need to handle this part” handoff in the middle.
We stand by what we file.
If the IRS sends a notice on a return we prepared, we respond to it. That posture is a feature of the engagement, not a separate service line.
A decade in ACA compliance. From the first filing season forward.
Our practitioners have been working in ACA compliance since the first reporting season in 2015 — when the regulations were new, the IRS guidance was thin, and the cost of getting it wrong was already being measured in five- and six-figure penalty assessments. We’ve prepared filings across nearly every employer profile the regulation contemplates, and we’ve defended employers against the full spectrum of IRS penalty correspondence: Letter 226-J, Letter 5005-A, Letter 5699, and the assessment notices that follow.
We handle federal filings and state filings in the same engagement — California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia, with others available as needed.