Good article - 

https://www.mayerbrown.com/en/insights/publications/2025/08/revisiting-the-state-of-the-law-in-erisa-forfeitures-cases

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My husband and I recently divorced.  We had chose to each keep our own pension plans and change beneficiaries to our children from previous marriages.

Our settlement agreement stated we would each retain 100% of our individual pensions and beneficiary was to be revoked including any designation of each as a recipient to survivor benefits.

The settlement agreement also stated the court reserves jurisdiction to issue a QDRO.  And if the plan did not permit a change to beneficiary then a constructive trust would be setup to ensure the children would receive the pension benefits.

i worked for HP and their plan is a defined benefit pension plan which is managed by Fidelity.

i worked through Fidelity and kept hitting a brick wall. No change to beneficiary after beginning to draw from the pension.  Then a Fidelity agent suggested I get a QDRO which would address the beneficiary rights.  However, the third party company I was referred to said there was no delegation for beneficiary in the company QDRO.  Beneficiary changes were not allowed.

i contacted the companies HR department and found an HR manager who gave me some guidance on getting the beneficiary changed.  I needed to provide a letter of instruction and my final divorce judgement outlining the terms of the pension.

i provided this documentation and was denied a beneficiary change.  I asked the HR manager who would receive the pension benefits upon my death. And he stated it would remain my ex-husband.

i am going to try and appeal this decision.  Meanwhile has anyone encountered this type of denial before?  If so, have they had any success on subsequent tries?

I didn’t provide an updated beneficiary statement as I understood from Fidelity the reluctance is the payment is calculated based on my husbands age and life expectancy.  To make that a non issue I stated to just restore my full pension.

i do have a beneficiary designation form which has a notarized signature from my ex-husband stating he will agree to having his beneficiary rights revoked.

The beneficiary form includes trust names and individual names under the trust. Or the beneficiary names.

I've been doing some reading about Retirement Trusts.  Would using a Retirement Trusts work around this problem if I submitted the beneficiary form with a trust named?

if that fails and my ex-husband passes away how do I setup a constructive trust that will pass along his pension to his kids but not have to pay taxes on funds I won’t receive?

Thanks for your patience reading this!  Any advice is much appreciated!

Carole

Are plans allowed to pay annual service fees?

Are plans allowed to pay plan termination fees?

Are there any fees that the plan is not allowed to pay?

Non profit sponsoring a 401(k) plan had a status change and is now a church organization.  Does this make the existing 401(k) plan a "church plan" effective with that status change? Should their 5500 filings cease unless they make an election?   Is there a time frame by when the election must be made after the status change? 

Any advantages to becoming an electing church plan?

A recordkeeper’s set of IRS-preapproved documents states the user’s plan is governed, to the extent ERISA does not supersede, by “the laws of the state in which [the recordkeeper] is located[.]”

The recordkeeper is organized under Delaware law and its registered office is in Delaware.

But the principal office is in another State.

What does “is located” mean?

Is it Delaware? Or is it the other State?

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I have a former HCE who took a full distribution of his account last year when he retired. This year we found out that we failed ACP test and need to make corrective distributions. Do we need to cut the former HCE another check? Or is this corrected by deeming last year's distribution as the correction?

I'm looking at 1.401(k)-2(b)(2)(v), which says, in part: "If the entire account balance of an HCE is distributed prior to when the plan makes a distribution of excess contributions in accordance with this paragraph (b)(2), the distribution is deemed to have been a corrective distribution of excess contributions (and income) to the extent that a corrective distribution would otherwise have been required."

I think I am hung up on the "to the extent that a corrective distribution would otherwise have been required." Any thoughts about what that language is supposed to mean?

We have a client that has had someone working abroad for them for a number of years.  Technically they haven't been on payroll, since they were living outside the U.S.  They have now moved to the U.S. and are working as a normal W2 employee.

The question is, what do we need to put in the Plan Document to allow this person to participate in the Plan immediately?  Do we have to amend the Plan to say that participants working remotely gain immediate entry into the Plan (while other employees have to wait the typical 1 year)? 

The issue is that compensation is defined as W2 salary, so technically they haven't been included in the Plan.

Thanks for your help!

Have a Cash Balance Plan terminating, projected to have small amount of excess assets at time of distribution (no 415 issues, etc.).  The plan document just specifies that excess assets will be distributed "in a nondiscriminatory manner".

In this situation, the Plan only covers the 100% Owner and his son, so both are HCEs and Key Employees.  Typically have either allocated on the basis for a regular DB Plan based on present value of 1% of Average Salary times years of participation (maximum 5); in Cash Balance scenario have done same manner where say take 1% of compensation in last 5 years (so hypothetical additional Cash Balance) and allocated on that basis.

However, the language "in a nondiscriminatory manner" where only dealing with HCEs looks like we could do anything we wanted and comply, so say ALL excess assets could go the Owner, or ALL to the son, or however the client wanted to apportion. Any thoughts?

Plan has never contained after-tax not employer match provisions. Plan is adding an after-tax provision. Plan may add a discretionary match, but it won't be used in 2025. I think plan should still be able to use prior year testing and assume an NHCE rate of 3%. Is that correct? My only pause is that there won't actually be a match in 2025, just the after-tax.  

Thank you for any guidance.

Have a scenario where a county employed judge has a private business.

As a county employee she has a government provided pension plan.

Her private company is very profitable and will be for at least another 8 - 10 years.

Can her private company (an S-corp) sponsor a defined benefit plan for her as the only employee? Would her government provided pension plan benefits she accrued factor into what could be done with the private plan?

Thanks.

DB plan covers husband and wife only. Biz is owned by husband but he retires/terminates and wife continues to to run the biz.

Does 110% rule apply to pay out the husband?

thanks

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I've got a MEP that allows for self-certified hardships.  A hardship request will go from the participant to the recordkeeper to us (TPA) to the MEP sponsor and then back to the recordkeeper for processing.  Fairly standard.

Found out today that the MEP sponsor will reach out to the adopting employer to say something like "hey, Participant is looking to take a hardship, maybe you want to talk to them about it", and sometimes they do and they arrange for a bonus or company loan so that the participant doesn't have to reduce their plan balance.

I don't think I like this.  I don't like that it introduces a possible level of unfairness (does every participant get spoken to?), maybe it blurs the line of investing advice ("don't take a taxable distribution, do this instead"), and maybe even some kind of privacy issue (though I'd think a participant should expect that they are requesting a hardship is pertinent plan administration information).

But I can't say for sure if this is actually black-and-white wrong, or if it just feels icky.  Thoughts?  Thanks.

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This is a really silly situation, but potentially confusing.

Corporation A purchases Corporation B during 2025. Corporation A sponsors a 401(k) plan that has true-ups. Corporation B's plan will be terminated, but effective December 1, the employees of corporation B will transfer to Corporation A. Corporation A credits service with Corporation B, so those employees will be eligible to defer in the Corporation  A plan immediately.

So, it seems that at least theoretically, there could be a true-up for these employees (fewer than 20) for the 1-month of salary deferrals in the Corporation A plan. Although the Corporation A plan calculates the match on an annual basis, they couldn't use compensation paid from another company while they were not a controlled group. Any disagreement with that? (As an aside - if they became a controlled group in, say, June, could/should the deferrals from that date be used in the calculation of a true-up in the Corporation A plan, even though those 2o employees were still employees of Corporation B?)

Then we come to the ridiculousness. The Corporation A HR person is adamant that they don't want to make any true-ups for the former Corporation B employees. If we assume that the deferrals for these former Corporation B employees only start in December and are based only on salary/match in December, the potential true-up is negligible at best. Is there any way to avoid a true-up in this situation, if the calculations require it? It seems like an amendment prior to 1/1/26 could result in a cutback.

I'm probably making this way more difficult than it is.

Employer A has a 401k plan.  The plan's eligibility provisions exclude employees of Related Employers.  Employer B purchases Employer A resulting in A and B in a controlled group.  A's 401k plan is not immediately terminated (plan still has assets that have not been distributed).  When performing coverage testing for A's 401k plan for the plan year after the transaction, the plan would like to exclude Employer B's employees from testing.  Under the IRS general rule (all employees of all employers in a controlled group must be included in testing), B's employees should be included in the testing.  A did not elect to include the 410(b)(6) transition period in 401k plan.  A would like to use permissive disaggregation to put separate out employees (specifically B's employee) that are not 21 and do not have 1 year of service (the 401k plan's eligibility provisions are more lenient - age 18 and 3 months of service).  Can A use permissive disaggregation as to B's employees if B's employees are not eligible to participate in the 401k plan in the first place?  Doesn't permissive disaggregation assume that the pool of employees are eligible employees?