Important changes regarding the Take Care® FSA Debit Card!

Effective January 1, 2008, new IRS guidelines will require that all grocery stores, discount stores, and warehouse clubs enhance their systems through the Inventory Information Approval System (IIAS) by identifying those items that are eligible under the Medical Flexible Spending Account. This enhancement will mean that each time you use your Take Care debit card at these merchants, all items that are eligible are approved at the “point of sale”, and will not require the participant to submit receipts at a later date. Here’s how the new enhancement will work:

• Take your over-the-counter healthcare products, prescriptions, and other items to the register and the clerk will ring them up.
• Swipe your Take Care card for payment (be sure to swipe your Take Care card first).
• The eligible amounts will be deducted from your Health Care Flexible Spending Account. The clerk will then ask for another form of payment for the non-FSA-eligible items.
• The receipt will identify your FSA-eligible items and also provide a subtotal of the FSA-eligible purchases and the sales tax paid.

Due to this new IRS requirement, grocery stores, discount stores, and warehouse clubs that do not enhance their inventory control through the IIAS process will not be allowed to accept any FSA debit cards!

New Update:

As of January 15th, 2008, while nearly all transactions are processing as expected, we are still in a period of transition, as merchants operate their new systems to support the IRS mandate.

The list below represents a summary of the issues that our card processor has been able to identify that impact IIAS transactions.

• Wal-Mart has identified an issue limited to a specific register within each store pharmacy. A fix will be implemented shortly, in the meantime, you may want to use another register.
• Wal-Mart.com is not coded for IIAS. The targeted rollout is scheduled for a timeframe of the 2nd quarter of 2008.
• SuperValu identified a training issue with how clerks were keying in some IIAS transactions at their stores. The result was that in some cases eligible items were not being flagged as eligible and therefore some transactions may have been declined. They have confirmed that they are working with their stores to correct this issue.
• Hannaford had an issue from 12/31/07 to 1/2/08. In some cases they were not able to process the Take Care Card authorization appropriately. This would create a pending pre-authorization in the system and would appear to be a denial to the cardholder. This did not impact all transactions, and has been corrected.
• Approximately 46% of all transactions from Safeway are denying with $0 as the Healthcare Eligible total. Safeway believes the issue is on their systems, but has not yet determined the root cause. They are working to address this issue.
• A system problem in the authorization handoff with the card processor resulted in the full amount authorized instead of the health care only amounts. The transactions impacted were limited and the system was updated on 1/8/08.

Please note: EBS/Atlanta will update this information on corrections and any other additional issues that may arise as soon as we receive notification. We appreciate your patience and understanding, while these merchants correct all issues that they may have internally.

Please click here to review the list of merchants that have either been certified as IIAS compliant or soon will be compliant to accept all FSA debit cards. Please note that EBS/Atlanta will provide updates on our website at www.ebsatlanta.com when additional merchants have made the appropriate changes and are approved.