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Yes, you're good either way. It's a 2024 allocation/annual addition based on 2024 compensation/census, and whether you allocate all or 1/7 or something in between because they want to exhaust in less than 7 years, your 2024 starting point is correct.

You answered your own question. They are domestic partners, not spouses. It is not a one-participant plan. File on 5500-SF, and yes they need a bond.

Check the plan document including the Adoption Agreement and Basic Plan Document. There is at least one pre-approved plan where the AA includes an explicit exclusion of compensation received from non-signatory related employers, and the default definition of compensation in the BPD includes amounts earned from a related employer regardless of whether the related employer is or is not a signatory employer. This may be helpful in this case if the plan has these provisions and if the contribution to the ABC plan was made by ABC based on compensation that included compensation earned at XYZ. This could be a proverbial Hail Mary.

As you have described the situation (I do not trust the description to be accurate or complete. Among other things, I assume that the “employer” is a private employer and not church related.), the core problem is that the plan suffers from a rectal cranial inversion. The plan has no business digging into the divorce. A death certificate would have sufficed to discharge its duty to question the change in spouse designation. It was a mistake to provide anything but the death certificate, but that mistake should not have led to the current situation. My earlier comment stands. The fiduciary is breaching its fiduciary duty by undue delay in processing the distribution. Unfortunately, the fiduciary is probably not amenable to informal education about the error of its ways, and will have to be forced to let go. That path is through the formal claims procedure to make the fiduciary face and explain its actions and position. An appeal of the initial decision may be necessary, and then possibly taking the matter to federal court. One of the good cards that the participant holds is that the federal court has the ability to award costs and attorneys fees against the fiduciary. Perhaps if that threat is brought up early enough, and it inspires the fiduciary to get its own good counsel, the process can be truncated. Your question about a lawyer is timely. It would be well to have competent counsel start the written claim. That might cause the fiduciary to engage counsel that will then disabuse the fiduciary of its current position. What kind of lawyer? One who knows what they are doing. One who has a focus on ERISA practice. That eliminates most lawyers who have a divorce practice.

You can't cross test but you can do an Average Benefits Test still. You can also do a General Test based upon allocation rates you just can't convert to benefits. In all seriousness if you are having 409p issues and having to invoke the parts of the plan document that call for adjustments the issues are serious enough the client ought to be willing to pay to have an ERISA attorney who is very knowable of ESOPs involved. I work for a firm that specializes in ESOPs and we are full of people, myself included, who have worked on ESOPs for decades. We would be recommending to the client to get the attorney in the loop.

Thanks Peter - the employer is questioning the validity of the request and asking if they can deny it. I did not ask any further details. Also, partly what prompted the question is we received an email from Empower the other day.... it states, that a participant may self certify up to 2 hardships per year. If the participant requests 3 or more, administrative review and approval is required. Plans have the option to limit the number of hardships a participant may take in a plan year to 2.

Yes it can exclude a class (like a location or job category) and yes it must pass coverage.

If you bring in an NHCE to Plan A such that it passes the RPT of 410(b) on its own then there is no reason to test A & B together, A's PS is safe harbor so no further testing and no gateway. If the NHCE you bring into Plan A is also in Plan B, be mindful of the aggregation for 415 limits.

The determination of who is or is not a nonresident alien can be very involved. Chapter 1 of IRS Publication 519, U.S. Tax Guide for Aliens provides guidance on how to determine whether an individual is a non-resident alien or is a resident (or has dual status!) https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p519.pdf The individual may qualify as a resident but can abandon their status. There also is a Substantial Presence Test which gets into topics like counting days worked in the US, commuting to work from another country, days while traveling through the US to name a few. The publication has 99 pages discussing rules for Aliens (but not even a word about UFOs 😁). The bottom line is a plan may have an exclusion for non-resident aliens but it may not be obvious when an individual is a resident alien.

I agree with the tenor of the comments, particularly the appropriateness of humility and value of professional advice. Note that the definition of "nonresident alien" is technical. For example, a US citizen employed in Paris is not a nonresident alien. Similarly, the term "US income" is technically defined.

Let's not be in a hurry to condemn the major recordkeeping platforms, and certainly only someone who has never made a mistake should cast the first stone. As a business, the major platforms operate within the constraints of their service agreements, most of which at some level leave to the plan sponsor the responsibility to interpret the plan and decide what to do. Plan sponsors should not assume that everything that could happen with a plan is within the scope of formal scope of services presented in the agreement. Plan sponsors also should not assume that the service agreements protect them from breaches in their fiduciary responsibilities. Yes, some individuals at service providers do not know the boundaries of their knowledge and try to be helpful (sometimes even try to be logical), resulting in providing incorrect information to the plan sponsor. Best practices for a plan sponsor is to work with a retirement plan professional who will have detailed knowledge about the plan provisions, the plan sponsor's perspectives on the goals and objectives for the plan, and the role of other service providers. This may be an attorney, accountant, retirement consultant, financial adviser or TPA. The independence of the retirement plan professional goes a long way to keeping a plan in compliance. Certainly none of us who are not lawyer's specializing in retirement plans should be providing legal advice to the plan or its fiduciaries.

NEVER believe anything anyone at Fidelity, Vanguard, Merrill Lynch, or any insurance company platform tells you. They are almost always wrong! If you really want to go with Fidelity, you have to work your way up the representative chain. Start by immediately asking (nicely) to speak to a supervisor and start from there. Eventually, you might get to someone who actually knows something....

Bri's answer is absolutely correct. That's always been a fundamental coverage exclusion rule. In the plan document exclude non-resident aliens with no US source income. Then make sure you document the excluded employees, which can be tricky if you are talking about a large group of potential exclusions. Regarding the comment on Fidelity. " . . . one would think they know what they're talking about when it comes to 401ks" One might think so, but one would be wrong. Same with Vanguard and the other biggies in the game. Their business is investing assets, not in providing legal advice. It may also be that Fidelity (and the others) don't want to get involved with plans that have other than "routine" situations -- they may conclude that the risk isn't worth it for the money they'd make. I speak from experience.

The company is making the decision to move to a MEP, and the company is picking the MEP as the service provider. The company is responsible for knowing the consequences of this decision before they sign documents and formally join the MEP. If the plan is going to merge into the MEP, the company also should take a look at any benefits in their existing plan that are protected benefits and ask how they would be handled in the MEP. These days, this is ripe for confusion and misinformation given that plan sponsors can make administrative decisions to adopt and apply plan features made available in recent legislation, but the plan sponsors do not have to incorporate these plan features in the plan document until later. If you are feeling magnanimous, consider doing the company a favor - BEFORE they sign up for the MEP - by sharing the questions they should be asking the MEP provider to help the company decide if the MEP provider is a good fit for the company's employees.

It sounds as though you have non-resident aliens earning no U.S. source income. As long as your plan affirmatively excludes people like this, you can exclude them from coverage/nondiscrimination testing.

1.415(a)-1 and go from there? 402(g) is a "per person" limit, 415 is a "per employer" limit.