Last week, the IRS announced it was increasing enforcement strategies aimed at Employee Stock Ownership Plans “ESOPs". The IRS stated this new focus on ESOPs is part of the effort to ensure tax laws are applied fairly and that high-income filers pay the taxes they owe. As part of this initiative, the IRS Commissioner commented that the IRS is ...
Last month the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that a company’s benefits committee did not properly delegate decision-making authority to its benefits department. As a result, the plaintiff’s appeal was reviewed under the de novo standard of review (which allows the court to conduct an independent analysis of ...
Errors in retirement plans happen even to the most well-intentioned plan sponsors. Several decades ago, the IRS published the first version of the Employee Plans Compliance Resolution Program (EPCRS), which outlines procedures by which plan sponsors can correct errors in their qualified retirement plans. Some of these errors could be ...
By: Lyndsey Barnett and Tommy Rogers*
As you may be aware, Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) fidelity bonds and fiduciary liability insurance are not the same. Both serve to mitigate risk for fiduciaries, and are critical aspects of an employee benefits plan. The difference between the two lies in the risks that they cover. Are you ...
If you sponsor a self-insured group health plan (including an HRA), make sure you set a calendar alert for July 31 to pay the annual PCORI fee (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute fee) for the 2022 plan year. The PCORI fee and the related IRS Form 720 are due no later than July 31st. The updated form can be found here, and the PCORI fee is reported ...
Lyndsey Barnett and Ihsan Walker
SECURE 2.0 has changed the game again by now allowing employers to save time and money by eliminating certain notices to be sent to unenrolled employees. In the past sponsors were required to send voluminous documents disclosing their retirement and welfare benefits plans to both enrolled and unenrolled ...
By: Lyndsey Barnett and Mikayla Howard*
The next installment of our updates on SECURE 2.0 is on another new in-service withdrawal option. SECURE 2.0 allows plan sponsors of defined contribution plans to amend their plans to allow plan participants who are victims of domestic abuse to make penalty-free early withdrawals from their retirement ...
If you are not offering a supplemental executive retirement plan (“SERP”) to your officers and executives, you likely have to answer “no” to the above. Since a SERP is designed to supplement other retirement benefits offered by an employer, such a plan can help an executive increase their income during retirement which may not be met by ...
We covered the history and statutory framework of required minimum distributions and the increase in the triggering age for RMDs in Part 1 of 3 of our SECURE 2.0 RMD blogposts. We will cover the changes to rules on annuities to promote lifetime income distribution options in a future blogpost. In this post, we discuss a potpourri of changes made to the ...
On Monday, April 10, President Biden on Monday signed a bill which immediately ended the Covid-19 National Emergency, first enacted during the Trump administration in 2020. The National Emergency (“NE”) and COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (“PHE”) have been in place since early 2020, and gave the federal government flexibility to ...