WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Obama administration pushed back the online enrollment portion of its small business health coverage exchange by a year, adding to the growing setbacks of the HealthCare.gov site, Politico reports.

Currently, small businesses can buy health coverage via federal-operated exchanges through paper applications, with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) making available other signup methods, such as through an agent, broker or insurer, in the future.

“We’ve concluded that we can best serve small employers by continuing this offline process while we concentrate on both creating a smoothly functioning online experience in the SHOP Marketplace, and adding key new features, including an employee choice option and premium aggregation services, by November 2014,” the HHS notice read.

The small-business exchanges run by the federal government, called SHOP, had been delayed by the administration days prior to the Oct. 1 debut of HealthCare.gov. Then, HHS indicated online enrollment for small businesses would start taking place “sometime in November,” but now the agency has pushed that back until next year.

The new deadline only impact SHOP exchanges run by the federal government in close to 36 states. SHOPs in states with their own exchanges have had few problems with online enrollment.