This is what we have been waiting for. In our earlier post, we reported that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) extended various deadlines for retirement plan filing and payment obligations. At the time of that publication, the Department of Labor (DOL) had not provided relief for ERISA filings. On April 28, 2020, the DOL provided … Continue Reading
Service providers for 401(k) and other retirement plans require access to personal data on participants including name, age, address, date of hire, compensation and possibly social security number to provide recordkeeping services. Are these plan service providers simply taking advantage of a business opportunity or are they improperly exploiting information that is a plan asset … Continue Reading
Selecting an auditor for an ERISA plan is one of those fiduciary responsibilities which has been a continuing concern of the Department of Labor (“DOL”). At a June 25, 2019 meeting of the DOL’s ERISA Advisory Council, James Haubrock of the American Institute of CPAs responded to the Council’s request for recommendations on how the … Continue Reading
Attorneys would define a Safe Harbor as a provision of a statute or a regulation that specifies that certain conduct will be deemed not to violate a given rule. In our ERISA world, a Safe Harbor is a provision of the retirement plan law that can cut through the sometimes fog of ERISA and provide … Continue Reading
“Procedural Prudence” is not a new concept. It underlies one of ERISA’s bedrock requirements. A fiduciary must discharge its duties prudently with care, skill, and diligence. It’s the process by which a fiduciary can accomplish this. In other words, it’s the “how” a decision gets made which is what the courts have focused on in … Continue Reading
Consider a typical retirement plan sponsored by a private employer. The employer is a fiduciary to the plan along with employees who individually serve as trustees or members of the plan’s investment or retirement committee.… Continue Reading
July 31st, is of course, the due date (unless extended) for calendar year ERISA plans required to file Form 5500 for the 2016 plan year. And, as in the past, there will be many plan sponsors who must indicate on the 5500 they have outdated fidelity bonds or none. Here’s a timely reminder why they … Continue Reading
Last month’s Supreme Court decision, Advocate Health Care Network v. Stapleton, upholding ERISA exemption for church-affiliated pension plans was a reminder that not all benefit plans are subject to ERISA. Indeed, non-profit employers who sponsor 403(b) plans can choose to be exempt from ERISA. But they have to tread carefully.… Continue Reading
Many 401(k) plan sponsors have wisely selected investment professionals to assist in selecting the plan’s investment menu, typically a listing of various mutual funds. Other plan sponsors may allocate this duty to company officers and other key employees.… Continue Reading
Participant loans from 401(k) plans have never been an employer favorite plan provision. (See Defined Contribution Plan Loans Can Be Expensive, @401k_TV). Now participant loans from 403(b) plans have come into focus.… Continue Reading
Checklists. Doctors use them. Engineers use them, Pilots use them. A checklist is a tool to manage complicated jobs. Atul Gawande, MD, author of best seller, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, puts it this way: Checklists not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher … Continue Reading
A recently filed lawsuit rekindled some old concerns about self-directed brokerage accounts. What are they? Let’s start at the beginning.… Continue Reading
We used to call them “rehires” back in the day: those employees who quit and were hired back. And it didn’t happen all that often. Many companies had policies not to. They’re now called “boomerang employees, and now it’s different. Different times, different economy. Employees who left the nest decide they want to come back, … Continue Reading
Actually, it was “only” a potential violation of privacy and data security rules imposed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) for which North Memorial Health Care of Minnesota (“NMHC”) agreed to pay $1.55 million. The violation alleged by the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) … Continue Reading
My apologies to William Camden for dragging him into ERISA. The proverbial saying in the headline, “An ynche in a misse is as good as an ell” appeared in his Remaines concerning Britaine published in 1637. It was an early forerunner of what we now know as “A miss is as good as a mile.” … Continue Reading
Class action law suits and Department of Labor enforcement initiatives have created a 401(k) fee state of mind for fiduciaries. How much, who pays for them, and how they are paid are issues about which service providers offer guidance. @GregIacurci in his article, How Should Retirement Plans Pay Their 401(k) Fees? in Investment News (registration … Continue Reading
A prohibition on discrimination has applied to self-insured plans for years under Section 105(h) of the Internal Revenue Code. The Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) now extends that ban on discrimination in insured group health plans. What does this mean? Insured health plans can no longer favor highly compensated employees in terms of eligibility for benefits … Continue Reading
Many employers sponsoring welfare benefit plans are understandably now totally focused on what they can see in front of them. Namely, the Affordable Care Act. But lurking just below the surface is ERISA and a host of other laws through which employers have to navigate. Let’s start with ERISA. Most welfare benefit plans are subject … Continue Reading
Every Summary Plan Description has to include one, a claims procedure that set forth the requirements for processing benefit claims and appeals. The underlying ERISA statute was written in a paternalistic manner with explicit provisions intended to offer protection to “the interests of participants in employee benefit plans and their beneficiaries…by providing for appropriate remedies, … Continue Reading
Back in the 1980s, I thought MacGyver could fix anything. Using everyday items, he invented ways to fix critical problems. These inventions became synonymous with the character and became known as “MacGyverisms”. Just a little more than halfway through Season 1, for example, he had Disarmed a missile with a paper clip Raised a fallen … Continue Reading
That’s the question employers ask regarding who pays 401(k) fees. The “us” being, of course, the employer, and the “them” being the plan participants. The number of “thems” has been increasing. According to Deloitte’s 2015 Annual Defined Contribution Benchmarking Survey, the number of employers completely covering the cost of fees declined … Continue Reading
That’s limitations as in “limitation periods”. A recent court case reminds ERISA plans to have such limitation periods and to communicate it to someone claiming a plan benefit. Let’s start with the basics. What’s a “limitation period”? In layman’s terms, it’s a law set forth in a State statute of limitations that sets time limits … Continue Reading
My social media role model, Kevin O’Keefe, blogged an interesting question yesterday, Individual lawyer or law firm blog, which is trusted more? Kevin is President and Founder of LexBlog, the pioneer in law firms and lawyers with blog (and non-lawyers such as yours truly). Understandably Kevin puts the … Continue Reading
