A client -- a 501(c)(3) entity -- has a contract with a local medical school pursuant to which school faculty (employed by the school) provide clinical services (treat patients) on the premises of this client. The faculty providing the services assigns its right to send bills for services to my client, meaning the client bills the patients and receives payment. The arrangement is that the faculty providing the clinical services gets paid 45 cents on $1 for each service provided. The rest of the money goes to support various departments of the 501(c)(3). The way the money collected is actually paid to the faculty/physicians is that, after my client collects the payments, it wires a lump sum to the medical school, with a list of which faculty/doctors to distribute payments to. There is no 1099 or W-2 from my client (the 501(c)(3) org). Instead, the faculty/doctors get paid from the medical
school through their regular pay stub/W-2 with an entry that says "clinical earnings."
My client wants the medical school to contract with an insurance company to provide disability insurance to the clinical faculty. Medical school wants nothing to do with it. Is there a group that can be joined to allow for the provision of this disability insurance to the clinical faculty? The medical school does not want to pay the premiums, but the 501(c)(3) client offered to cover the cost out of their reserves. My client wants the disability benefits to be tax-free to the faculty/physicians; however, in order to do so, the premiums would have to be paid with after-tax dollars. So for example, if the medical school agreed to do it, the medical school pays $100 for disability premium for an employee, which then is added to the employee's income. The employee than pays tax on regular salary plus
the $100, and subsequently, the disability benefits are tax-free to the employee (because tax already paid on the $100).
Is there a way that my client can pay these disability premiums? They are offering to do so. So in other words, since the medical school doesn't want to be involved with this, can my client, the 501(c)(3), somehow (maybe before releasing the money to the medical school) pay the disability premiums for the faculty/physicians, then issue them a 1099 reporting it as additional income to them, such that the faculty/physicians pay tax on that extra income, and thus the benefits become tax free? Is something like this permissible? I welcome any suggestions.