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Do you have a cite for that? I thought, and apparently everyone else responding, that it was like any other short year - i..e the end of the month.

No cite exists. It is the end of the month.

oops

But now you have the problem that participants were notified of the problem. Are they going to rescind the notice? "Hey, we screwed up your match, so we are gonna make it right." "On second thought, nope. Psych!"

Did you mean "TH"? Either way, not if the document doesn't allow discretion.

MIKE--I responded the way I did because of his sentence below which seemed to be a discovery to him (unless I missed a nuance which is quite possible). "I have also filed 1 5500 form (the filing as an EZ was something I asked IRS 15+ years ago and was told that it was ok to do EZ filing since both entities are spouses)."

12/15/2020 if 5558 filed by 9/30/2020 (initial due date)

I think ERISA frowns upon this as it's the Plan Administrator's obligation to retain plan records on determination of benefit payments, not the participant's burden to show they are due payments. In fact I believe some of that is how we got ERISA in the first place so many years ago.

Absolutely not. Thats kind of a chicken or egg question, no? The sponsor is required to provide statement, notices, and disclosures to the participant. The fact that employee never received anything doesn't mean that they were never a participant, it could be a failure by the sponsor to provide them with statements and notices. I don't think that you can require the employee to produce a document that the employer was required to provide to the employee, and then treat the lack of such document on the part of the employee as an indication that he/she was never a participant. I think that the the SSA notice is enough to put the document or research burden on the plan, not the participant. If the sponsor can't put their hands on those documents, its on them to try harder and spend more in order to get an answer. Again, Im not saying pay out, Im saying we keep sloppy records is not an answer. I think most of them are people who got paid out but never removed from the SSA list as a code D, rather than employees who were never entitled to a benefit at all. An answer like we went through our records and you were never vested or you were paid in 19XX is sufficient, but "prove it!" isnt.

I think the point was that you are asking the participant to prove that he/she did not receive a distribution, which would be "proving a negative". If participant says they dont have a record of getting a distribution, I think it is on the plan to show that they did. The plan sponsors failure to keep records could be an issue. I would not simply pay out, but I dont think the plan can say "sorry, due to our poor record retention we dont know if you got paid, so we cant pay you out unless you prove that you didn't paid" Sponsor/TPA is going to have to do the heavy lifting to come up with the answer.