Several months ago I used my FSA card to pay a fee which my health care provider charges for the use of medical information plan (Electronic Medical Record (EMR)* system).
My receipt clearly states that the money was paid for the use of the medical information plan. It also contains my name, provider name and date when the money was paid.
IRS publication 969 in the section Distributions From an FSA says this:
Qualified medical expenses. Qualified medical expenses are those specified in the plan that would generally qualify for the medical and dental expenses deduction. These are explained in Publication 502, Medical and Dental Expenses.
IRS publication 502, page 12 says this:
Medical lnformation PIan You can include in medical expenses amounts paid to a plan that keeps medical information in a computer data bank and retrieves and furnishes the information upon request to an attending physician.
So according to the law the money I paid fully qualify as FSA expenses and this was confirmed by the lawyer I talked with.
However my receipt and supporting documentation was rejected 3 times. I spent several hours and 3 rounds of phone conversation with their support team but they plainly refuse to validate my expense without providing any reasonable explanation. They typically start with saying that a name or a date is missing in a receipt and when pointed exactly to the place in the receipt where information they need is located they are trying to pick up some other formality. One guy told me that my receipt does not look like a receipt
For example. Eventually when they are completely out of arguments they say we do not validate such expenses or such expenses do not qualify. This is clearly against the law but they do not seem to care.
Apart from that my impression about their level of service is pretty awful. You have to listen for their automatic answering machine for 5 minutes before being connected to a real person and sometimes the call gets interrupted during this period so you have to start again; receipts submitted via fax are periodically lost; their rejection descriptions are ambiguous and created in the most generic
Way possible to avoid pointing out exact problem.
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