Sarah Hurtubise of the Daily Caller documents a disturbing delay related to a key piece of the Affordable Care Act.

Americans have to be prepared for an increased individual mandate tax to hit in just two weeks, but the White House still hasn’t gotten around to approving the Internal Revenue Service paperwork on the requirement.

The IRS is trying to comply with federal rules that require White House approval on its new paperwork for the individual mandate. But the White House has rejected one proposal and ignored another, according to new research from the American Action Forum, a free-market think tank headed by former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin.

The IRS’ workload was upped drastically by the individual mandate, which will require Americans to submit a tax form proving they have health insurance or pay a growing fine to the agency. It appears the Obama administration was running behind on the paperwork requirements as well as pretty much everything else.

The IRS submitted a proposal for collecting the individual mandate tax to the White House on Aug. 23, 2013, just four months before the individual mandate began to take effect. The agency requested approval by Aug. 26 — a unexpectedly quick turnaround for approval of any regulation, according to AAF.

Turns out, the White House didn’t approve the paperwork after all. AAF found that the White House rejected the proposal almost a year later — putting the three-day request to shame. It appears the White House preferred the individual mandate tax to be bundled with income tax collection, which the country goes through every spring.

But the IRS had already submitted a proposal to the White House for that purpose in April 2014, months before the White House rejected its year-old proposal. Right now, there’s no official IRS doctrine on how exactly the agency is supposed to be collecting the individual mandate penalty, or, as the administration calls it, the “shared responsibility payment.”