Organizations that have a hands-on approach to pension plan administration may actually have their hands full. Outsourcing offers the confidence in knowing your plan is being administered accurately, efficiently and cost-effectively.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.