By Lyndsey Barnett and Benjamin White*
When an employee has a qualifying event that causes a loss of his or her group health plan coverage, an employer subject to COBRA is obligated to provide the employee, and any other qualified beneficiaries, with notice of their right to elect continuation coverage under COBRA. Employers are often not aware ...
A partial plan termination is easy to overlook. There’s not even a statutory definition of what constitutes a partial termination (“PT”) of a qualified retirement plan. Yet, there are a lot of circumstances that may cause a PT to occur. Of course the main consequence of PT is that it triggers full vesting of affected participants.
There are ...
The PCORI fee, which stands for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute fee, was one of the new fees imposed by the ACA on group health plans. All group health plans, regardless of the size of the plan, are required to pay the fee. The fee is due each July 31st regardless of the plan’s year end. For fully-insured plans, the responsibility for ...
Employers are responsible for timely transmitting deferrals and loan repayments to the plan trust for 401(k) plans. So, what is considered timely? Under DOL regulations, employee deferrals and loan repayments become plan assets (and therefore must be deposited in the plan trust to avoid a prohibited transaction) on the earliest date that you ...
Form 5500 filing season is upon us. Each July, we receive calls from clients on items that their plan auditors or Form 5500 preparers have detected. One common question that we receive is “What document is our ‘wrap’ document?” This question is one that never used to be asked by the preparers, but now seems to have made it on most of their ...
After nearly a decade of retirement plan fee litigation involving 401(k) plans, plaintiff firms are focusing on a new class of potential defendants. Recently, 403(b) plans sponsored by universities have become the targets in the ongoing barrage of retirement plan fee litigation. The first wave of coordinated class action lawsuits were filed ...
Some notice requirements are simply just one more administrative burden for the sponsor of a qualified retirement plan. For section 403(b) plans, ensuring that your employees have an effective opportunity to make elective deferrals is imperative. One benefit a 403(b) plan has over a 401(k) plan is that it does not have to comply with certain ...
A broken promise is a terrible thing. Historically, defined benefit pension benefits were the holy grail of promises in the retirement plan world. But, things have changed, especially for multiemployer pension plans after the passing of the Kline-Miller Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 (“MPRA”). MPRA does not offer these plans a ...
While Congress continues to battle over how to reform health care reform, employers must continue to comply with the Affordable Care Act, including the employer shared responsibility or pay or play provisions. In order to avoid penalties, large employers must provide “affordable” minimum value coverage to all full-time employees. Prior ...
Generally, a plan administrator’s decision to deny a claim for benefits is subject to the de novo standard of review with no deference given to the plan administrator by the courts. However, after the 1989 U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Firestone, such determinations are reviewed under the highly deferential standard of abuse of ...