But of course:

The problem is that the income reported by more than a million consumers doesn’t match what the IRS has on file. And the procedure to match income with subsidy can’t be implemented because the back end of the healthcare.gov website still hasn’t been built.

We’re in the very best of hands. But you already knew that, didn’t you? More here:

…[A] large group of Americans…listed incomes on their insurance applications that differ significantly ”” either too low or too high ”” from those on file with the Internal Revenue Service, documents show.

The government has identified these discrepancies but is stuck at the moment. Under federal rules, consumers are notified if there is a problem with their application and asked to upload or mail in pay stubs or other proof of their income. Only a fraction have done so, according to the documents. And, even when they have, the federal computer system at the heart of the insurance marketplace cannot match this proof with the application because that capability has yet to be built…

Administration officials do not yet know what proportion are overpayments or underpayments. Under current rules, people receiving unwarranted subsidies will be required to return the excess next year.

I’ve already written about some of the problems with estimating income to determine Obamacare subsidies, for example here. I want to reiterate, though, that the problem is especially acute for the self-employed, and the individual insurance market (as opposed to employment-based insurance) is heavily weighted towards the self-employed.

So the snafu described at the beginning of this post (a million people) is likely to actually be an even bigger snafu than that, because it’s probably not going to just be a question of people misstating the income that was on their 2013 tax returns. Many people who estimated their income as being exactly what it was on their 2013 tax forms will also turn out to be wrong about their income for 2014 when they have to actually take a good look at the hard figures and file their tax returns for that year. Self-employment income varies naturally, and often quite a bit. So even good faith estimates can often be very very wrong.

It’s always been clear that Obamacare will have to deal with that fact by either giving the person more money or clawing back a government overpayment. Good luck with that. It also has long been clear that this will take a vast amount of resources, that the government may not be quite up to figuring it out correctly, and that many people will be only too eager and willing to game the system.