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Client received CP283 notice.  I know we can still file under DFVC Program and request abatement, my question is, has anyone done that recently and does it still generally work?  I know never say never but curious if others have done it recently.

I'm newer to the MEP/PEP space, but I'm seeing this happening constantly - wondered how common it is and what people normally do.

An adopter moves from one PEO MEP (MEP A) to another (MEP B), effective 4/1/26.  They had changed their PEO provider in November 2025 so had to make the switch.

Their new PEO provider continued employee deferral withholding during the interim move from MEP A to MEP B.  With the effective date of the adoption with MEP B not being until 4/1, these deferrals were sent MEP A to be deposited into employee accounts.  MEP A would not accept these contributions, so the PEO has just been holding on to these contributions for months.

My thought is that they would need to return the deferrals withheld between November and the effective date of the adoption into MEP B - is there any other alternative?

 

Plan has dual eligibility for deferrals and SH Match.

I understand that removes the Top Heavy 'pass' plans often get.

The Plan has like 10 participants, everyone has been there several years. Plan is 80% TH.

Are they subject to the TH minimum every year?  Or is it just for years where there is someone new and they are not eligible for the SH Match?

(We have since amended the Plan to have the same eligibility for SH as deferrals.)

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Glad to be back though under another name because I've switched employers a few times and I totally forgot my old username, but I know this is at least a 3rd one *Ü*. I am NOT the plan administrator here, but have 25+ years (back to the non-mutual fund quarterly stone age on recordkeeping of 401ks).  I have not kept up 100% with what type of corrections are required, so bear with me on these details. Sorry this one is a little long!

Participant became eligible to participate on 11/1/25.

Participant chose 6% Pretax Deferral that came with 4.5% Employer Match (with a 5 year cliff vesting schedule) along with receiving a 3% Safe Harbor contribution each pay period (there were 4 left in 2025).  Each pay period had the same amount of Plan Eligible Compensation (basically gross salary without bonus or GTL imputed income) and the same amount of deferrals and contributions.

When compliance tests were run, somehow the recordkeeper forfeited a small amount of Employer Match and Safe Harbor for 2 employees (the other was eligible on 3/1). One of them being myself. I only noticed when I went into the employer system on 5/6/26 and saw 2 (albeit small) withdrawals on 4/13/26.   I requested an explanation from our internal plan administrator (who reviewed the compliance process/testing and reports and approved these withdrawal/forfeitures) and got told to "reach out to the recordkeeper for clarity. There is nothing we in (dept) effectuated here."   I spent 2.5 hours on the employer's site  and speaking with 3 people at the recordkeeper (that I have access to since I am the HR Manager and know a lot about benefits, etc. My CEO agreed to that access when I started although I play no part in recordkeeping/auditing/etc)

So I dug...of course I did LOL!  I found that both withdrawals were forfeited amounts plus associated earnings, which was odd since the contributions exactly matched the calculations against my pay each pay period that came from payroll to the recordkeeper.  I also found the confirmation form where the department approved these withdrawals the same day they got the compliance report (so no one in that dept questioned it then).  I then figured that it had to be based on eligible pay being somehow incorrect.  So I sent that department another email with my findings an got told "It does stink that money is taken from us".  I had to escalate this to my CEO with the threat of a formal DOL participant request for the CEO to go back to this department head to actually have them review anything. And lo and behold the eligible pay was incorrect.  Shock, I know!  They claimed they did full year pay and subtracted out 9 months from a prior pay system (which had its own issues) and then 1 extra month's pay to get to 11/1. Not sure why they didn't just add up the 4 pay periods that counted as eligible 401k plan compensation.  A few employers ago, I had 3 eligible compensation calculations depending on employee service with at least 2 changing on their anniversary date.

In the end, on the 5/15/26 payroll submission, that dept added those two amounts in with current SH and ERM (such that now payroll doesn't match the recordkeeper for 2026 and these two will be overstated in the 2026 compliance records or at least won't match between payroll and the recordkeeper).  And I didn't get the miniscule interest back nor interest from 4/13 to 5/15.  Not that it would be much.

In the end, my question is did something change on how corrections are completed? Is this now how "corrections" are done?  Would it not be "cleaner" to have the recordkeeper reverse the two participant ERM/SH forfeitures and put the earnings back at least for that time period? Because it still shows as a forfeited withdrawal on 4/13 and an increased contribution for 5/15....

That said, neither of the two participants received the letter(s) from the recordkeeper nor did the dept even tell us that they had approved these (albeit small) withdrawals. So had I not been vigilant I think it never would have been found!

Am I wrong to think (1) it should have been communicated when approved to withdraw - wouldn't most internal plan administrators give the employees a heads up  and (2) I should have gotten the original earnings back along with another month's earnings?  I'm not going to press the 2nd but wanted to confirm my thought process.

How come crazy things always seem to happen to be something I find (this isn't the first with payroll/the old payroll system and my own personal information - not as HR Manager)?

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A participant and his spouse become divorced prior to the participant's annuity starting date under a defined benefit plan. Unlike many plans, benefits are paid from current plan assets (instead of from annuity contracts purchased from an insurance company). The participant and his ex-spouse agreed upon a proposed division of his benefit, based upon the fraction of the months in which the couple was married over the participant's entire period of service with the employer. However, no formal QDRO was entered by a court until 11 years after the participant's annuity starting. Nevertheless, the participant commenced receiving reduced pension payments based upon the parties' agreed division as of his annuity starting date, in the form of a ten-year certain and life annuity. The QDRO reaffirms the division between the parties and entitles the ex-spouse to a portion of the participant's total retirement benefit (under the agreed-upon formula) retroactive to his annuity starting date.

Based on DOL Regulations at 29 C.F.R. Section 2530.206, the timing of the entry of the QDRO does not adversely impact its qualification. In addition, the QDRO provides for payment to the ex-spouse for the participant's lifetime (since the 10-year guarantee period has expired), which is a fomr of payment provided under the Plan document. Moreover, case law which is contolling in the circuit in which the Plan is administered and in which the participant and former spouse reside do not compel a different result. 

This is my question: given the eleven-year period that has elapsed since the annuity starting date, is the payment due to the spouse for the period beginning on the annuity starting date and ending on the date on which the first prospective payment begins under the QDRO, permitted to be increased by interest or some other manner of compensatiing the former spouse for the delay in commencing the benefit payments to her? If the benefit had been provided under an annuity contract, I would be inclined to say no. However, since the benefit is provided from the assets of the plan's trust, I am inclined to conclude that some measure of earnings is due to the former spouse. Also, as a corollary to my question, if you agree that the spouse should be entitled to interest or earnings for the period of the delay in commencing payments to her, how should the plan arrive at an appropriate level of interest or measure of earnings?

Thanks in advance!

I think the answer is no but still would like to run this by the gurus.

Owner only plan over age 50.

For 2024, LLC filing as a sole-prop.

For 2025, LLC elected to file as an S-corp, no w-2s were taken. Also had schedule c income over 500k.

For 2026, only s-corp.

I do not think 2026 catch up needs to be Roth, agree?

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I started at my job in Colorado at a small business in November of last year. I am the owner's EA, and I do a little of everything. My past positions I have had some minor HR experience, mostly payroll/time tracking/record keeping/PEO admin. I have extremely limited knowledge on retirement accounts on either employee or employer side, and my boss knows this. 

When my boss set up a Roth IRA (Vestwell Colorado SecureSavings) at the end of 2024, he told current employees and employees he hired after, that we were matching 3% of all employee contributions to their IRA. Maybe he thought it was happening automatically, but it never did because it was the kind of IRA that didn't allow employer contributions. I don't think he knew any of this until I had an employee ask me why their contributions weren't being matched, so I looked into it.

We recently switched over to a Human Interest 401k Safe Harbor plan, and my boss asked me if we can make up for all the missed IRA employer contributions in late 2024/2025/early 2026 by adding them to employee plans off-cycle. That isn't possible, so I am trying to figure out other options we have.

• We cannot add off-cycle contributions.

• We cannot edit employee matching percentages (his idea was to change the percentages until the funds were equal to our missing match).

• Our account manager at HI said an option is to use a "Profit Sharing" feature of our plan, but would not be able to do so until early 2027.

He doesn't want to just cut checks, but I'm not sure that's the way to do it anyway. Like I said, I have very little knowledge of retirement accounts and am feeling 100% lost, hence my username. Any ideas on this?

We have a pooled plan that we just found out the sponsor did not deposit the 2024 safe harbor contribution.

I believe we have until 12/31/2026 to correct this error, but the sponsor must put in in lost earnings from 12/31/2025.

I've calculated the year to date earnings on the trust to be 0.88% which is lower than the DOL VFCP calculator.

Can I use the actual rate or do we have to use the higher of the actual or the DOL calculator?

Would love an opinion on an issue with a panicky plan sponsor: 😄

Recordkeeper paid advisory fees to a financial services company for the first three quarters of 2025.
The financial services company paid the advisor fee to the advisor for the plan.
Advisor left the service of the financial services company in Q4 of 2025 and moved to financial services company #2.
Plan Sponsor and financial svcs company have a dispute and financial services company agrees to refund advisory fees for Q1-Q3 2025 ($6500)

Here's the issue - financial service company made check out to the plan sponsor's company, not to the plan.  Plan sponsor then deposited the check into their corporate bank account.

Do we have a prohibited transaction situation?  Or can the money just get pulled from the corp bank acct, put back into the plan (participant accounts) and document what occurred in the plan records and move on?

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As we all know the IRS got rid of the "Flexible" match where you can just say the match is discretionary and come up with any formula operationally.  The FT document has an option for a discretionary match (8a) where the options are "as a uniform percentage of Matched  Employee Contributions" (which is of course the normal one) or "as a flat dollar amount for each Participant, which of course we don't really see.

Here is my issue.  I cannot find anywhere that, with respect to the "uniform percentage of Matched Employee Contributions", I am able to cap the Matched Employee Contributions at X%.  So everyone has a match expressed as X% of the first Y% contributed (e.g., 50% of the first 6%).  I cannot find anywhere in this document that I can include the Y% / 6% cap in my examples.  Has anyone noticed this? People always say, "you can get to the same outcome if you use the maximum match section and cap the match at 3%" - that only works if you never change the match so it's not a great solution.

To be honest, this was a real issue for me in the FT 401k plan as well, Cycle 3.  I am very curious to know if they finaly figured this out for Cycle 4.

As a sanity check I am just really hopeful other people have seen this too?  Or maybe I'm missing something?

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Ok, the below came from a major record keeper. Please confirm who must contribute catch-up as Roth in 2026 - those with FICA wages of $145,000+ for 2025 or those with $150,000+ in 2025 or 2026? This should be the most simple determination in all of pension regulations but some sources seem to be wrong or misleading in their wording.

Thank you!