Self-directed brokerage accounts (“SDBAs”) have been offered in retirement plans for years, and are grounded in the principal that some participants are sophisticated enough to manage their account’s investments and outgain a plan’s designated investment alternatives. However, the Department of Labor has been ...
If your 401(k) plan is continuing to have problems passing the ADP test, you should seriously consider adding an automatic enrollment feature if your plan doesn’t already automatically enroll participants. A recent study by Vanguard found that participation rates more than double to 91% for plans with automatic enrollment ...
Tom Breitenbach
Just before Christmas and in the last hours of the 2014 assembly, the Ohio legislature quietly passed, and Governor Kasich signed into law, a provision enabling non-governmental employers to amend their 401(k) or 403(b) plans to provide for automatic enrollment and withholding of employee wages. What’s the big deal ...
The Departments of Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Resources have been busy lately in the field of excepted benefits, which have the luxury of avoiding HIPAA requirements and the ACA market reforms. On October 1, 2014, the Departments issued final regulations making limited scope vision and dental benefits easier to ...
Chris Allesee
As far as Christmas presents go, the proposed regulations released yesterday by the DOL, HHS, and Treasury are roughly equivalent to a toothbrush or a pair of socks...useful, but not terribly exciting. However, for plan administrators, clarity is always a welcome gift, especially as it relates to disclosure obligations.
Plan ...
Most plan sponsors have the best of intentions in operating their 401(k) plans correctly. But mistakes happen to even the best of them. So what is a plan sponsor to do if an employee made a Roth deferral election but the employer took the money and contributed it on a pre-tax basis instead? In its latest newsletter the IRS details ...
Are you tired of all the end-of-year reminders? Tough luck, because here’s one more. We’ve previously discussed the need to amend your qualified retirement plan to comply with Windsor by recognizing legally married same-sex couples. As an avid follower of our blog, you also know that IRS Notice 2014-19 gave plan sponsors ...
As you likely already know, the ACA put a limit into place for health FSA plans. For plan years beginning on or after January 1, 2013, a health FSA plan could no longer permit participants to make salary reduction contributions in excess of $2,500 per year. While this new rule has been the law since the beginning of 2013, in Notice 2012-40
After reading Part 1, I’m sure you requested your forfeiture account statements, and then ran right to your plan document to check the forfeiture provisions. Now that you have a firm grip on the forfeiture account balance and how these assets can be used, let’s discuss when you should use them, and why going through this ...
Forfeitures certainly look like good money – a versatile stockpile of assets that can only be put to positive uses with a positive outcome. When they are used right, this is absolutely true. Participants are happy because they may pay less from their personal accounts for plan expenses and receive extra allocations of cash, and ...