Insights & Guidance from Our Experts

In today’s competitive labor market, employers are scrambling to enhance benefit programs to attract and retain top talent, while also pursuing strategies to reduce employee benefit costs. Reviewing your retirement program provides an opportunity to ensure your plan design aligns with your organization’s culture and objectives.

Entering into the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lives of workers across the country have been disrupted in a number of ways. Employers have taken measures to reduce costs, including making layoffs, reducing salaries and cutting back on other benefits. This has resulted in a profound negative impact on both employers and employees, as several studies suggest that finances are the top cause of employee stress.

Pension risk transfer, or de-risking, continues to be popular, and today’s interest rate environment makes it more cost-effective to de-risk. Identifying and implementing a de-risking approach that matches your organization’s objectives can mitigate and reduce pension plan risk.

Retirement plans can evolve today to meet the needs of employees who wish to roll over — or not roll over — their assets. Research shows many workers are interested in keeping retirement savings in their employer-sponsored retirement plan (ESRP) after retirement, and more organizations are accommodating them.

Your pension plan’s improved funding status is now face-to-face with market volatility, geopolitical uncertainty and hints of a recession. If you’ve been contemplating de-risking your defined benefit pension plan, the time may be right to develop a successful pension risk transfer strategy.

Employers have an opportunity to help their employees acquire skills to improve income security and achieve the financial freedom to retire. Finding the right retirement plan recordkeeper is key to improving employees' financial security — and offsetting the financial impact of delayed retirement to your organization.

Most U.S. workers are not comfortable admitting they need help with their finances. Day after day, financial stresses can take a toll on physical and mental health. According to the American Psychological Association, chronic financial stress can lead to depression, insomnia, anxiety, heart disease and diabetes.

After two full years of a global pandemic, are your employees any closer to being retirement ready? Implementing slight changes in your plan’s design and communicating effectively with employees can have an immediate impact to your employees and your organization’s bottom line.

Do you have a retirement plan compliance checklist? If you think your organization doesn’t need one, think again. Review these common IRS and DOL compliance issues, and conduct a self-audit to help your organization company avoid future costs and liabilities.

Excessive fee lawsuits in recent years have pushed insurance carriers to be wary of issuing fiduciary liability insurance coverage to employers. As a result, employers may now have to jump through hoops to secure adequate Directors and Officers (D&O) liability insurance.

No one likes being audited by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) or Department of Labor (DOL), but all qualified retirement plans (defined benefit and defined contribution) may be selected for an audit.

If you haven’t completed your defined contribution plan’s Cycle 3 restatement, it’s time to move that task to the front burner and turn up the heat. The Cycle 3 restatement period for DC plans is winding down and restatements must be adopted no later than July 31, 2022.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” It may not be the mantra of plan sponsors, but this old adage certainly sums up the Department of Labor’s (DOL’s) approach to the fiduciary duty of searching for missing plan participants.

Have you been putting off an actuarial audit of your governmental pension plan? Why postpone peace of mind? Actuarial audits of government retirement plans are considered a best practice by the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) and should be conducted at least once every five years (more often if there have been significant unexpected changes in assets or liabilities). An independent review can enhance trust – for both the fiduciary and the public – that the pension plan is being governed properly.

What is a mega backdoor Roth IRA? Can I do a backdoor Roth IRA in 2021? What is the limit to a backdoor Roth IRA? Is a backdoor Roth IRA worth it? Can I do a backdoor Roth every year? Through 401(k) and 403(b) plans, organizations of all kinds may offer opportunities for employees to implement a mega backdoor Roth IRA strategy.

Organizations spend over $50,000 per employee each year an employee delays retirement. Implementing strategies to better prepare the workforce for retirement can help offset the financial impact to the organization.

Keeping your 401(k) plan on course requires vigilance, and a good plan sponsor navigates more than just the investment climate and daily maintenance of the plan. Tracking a 401(k) plan includes thorough reviews throughout the year, with employers focused on fees and performance, compliance, and participant communication. Here is a concise checklist to keep your 401(k) plan on course.

In March 2021, the IRS made note of recent rule changes to the responsibilities of retirement plan participants and beneficiaries, and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) also reversed course on a final rule that affects fiduciaries’ duties. Understand how recent IRS rule changes may impact plan participants and affect fiduciary duties.

If you haven’t completed your defined contribution plan’s Cycle 3 restatement, it’s time to move that task to the front burner and turn up the heat. The Cycle 3 restatement period for DC plans is winding down and restatements must be adopted no later than July 31, 2022.

The Department of Labor (DOL) continues to focus on missing participants in retirement plans. In recent years, the DOL, in conjunction with the Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA), has been auditing retirement plans and reinforcing the actions that plan sponsors must take to locate lost participants and pay the benefits due to them.

If you sponsor a frozen defined benefit pension plan, a mostly “vanilla” individually designed defined pension plan or a defined benefit pension plan already on a pre-approved format, you will want to think about restating your plan now in the most recent IRS pre-approved format. The restatement satisfies the need to update the plan for the Pension Protection Act of 2006 (“PPA”). This is true for traditional defined benefit plans, as well as cash balance plans.

If a single employer overfunded pension plan is terminating and its participants and beneficiaries are on track to receive full benefits, the plan sponsor will likely ask if the excess is theirs. In other words, will the surplus revert to the plan sponsor? The answer is maybe.

With many retirement nest eggs still recovering from the 2008 economic downturn and its effect on 401(k) and other retirement savings, those who thought they were close to retirement have found themselves working longer and later in life than they had originally planned. Employers with a defined benefit plan may have more employees working beyond their plan’s normal retirement age.

A qualified retirement plan account holder may choose to delay — up to a point — paying taxes on retirement savings by keeping them in a qualified retirement plan or IRA. The aforementioned “point” eventually arrives in the form of a required minimum distribution (RMD).

A plan sponsor may be unable to implement a de-risking strategy currently because of cost, market conditions, or resource availability. Even if implementing a de-risking technique is not feasible at the present time, plan sponsors may wish to develop a plan and begin their preparation for eventual implementation.