Peter Gulia

Is it permitted (and practical) to charge a participant's (or beneficiary's) account for the plan-administration expenses of delivering required notices and other prudent communications?

My 2 cents, thank you for thinking about this. My question is not about whether relevant law permits a plan to charge against the accounts of severed-from-employment participants a proper share of the plan's administration expenses. I assume the law permits this. Rather, my question is about whether there are practical constraints, perhaps following recordkeepers' business methods, on implementing those charges. BenefitsLink mavens, any thoughts about my (restated) question? And how about my implicit assumption that, if plan-administration expenses are fairly apportioned, a plan's sponsor might be relatively indifferent to whether a small-balance account is distributed or remains invested?

If you'd like to read the rule mdm09 refers to, here's a link: https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=2dd0cb953fab89b3f5b297cd598aa3f8&mc=true&node=se26.2.1_1125_64&rgn=div8

Is this an opportunity for another service provider to offer a useful service?

A question: If a plan's sponsor amended a plan so it does not provide an involuntary distribution (except as needed to meet IRC 401(a)(9)), whether mandated or at the administrator's discretion, would that change resolve many of the concerns MoJo describes? For a plan that does not "cash out" small-balance accounts, is it feasible to charge against the accounts of severed-from-employment participants a proper share of the plan's administration expenses?

Perhaps those who feel an administrator should do more to locate a participant (or to urge a participant to respond) might think twice if the administrator allocated the expense of each search or other effort as a charge on the account of the missing participant.

Those who have remarked on some investigators’ unsupported assertions about which methods and how much effort a plan’s administrator ought to use in searching for a missing or unresponsive participant might want to read this American Benefits Council letter. https://www.americanbenefitscouncil.org/pub/?id=d68a50ca-908c-9e37-d53d-3111689f91ff

So far, the contender (furnished separately from the bulletin board) for worst is a 111-page document with many references to other documents, which I estimate (based on relevant business experience) as at least hundreds, if not a couple thousand, pages more. The 408b-2 disclosure is pages 109-111. Those pages do not specify any element of compensation as a particular amount, or as a percentage of plan, trust, or fund assets managed or advised. Instead, each paragraph describes other documents in which a reader could find information. Likewise, the 408b-2 does not state whether any covered service provider is or isn't a fiduciary, but refers to other documents. So do BenefitsLink readers have other contenders for worst disclosure?

dmwe, thank you! Do you remember whether anything at the outset of the 70+ pages told a reader which source document one should look at to discern which service configuration applies?

Mike Preston, if there were no excise tax, is there any other reason a provision for paying the beneficiary might be unwise?

CuseFan and Mojo, can you help me with examples of hard-to-read disclosures?

Beyond jpod's originating question, what do BenefitsLink mavens think about adding to a plan document a provision to make clear that anything (except an alternate payee's rights) not paid before the participant's death, even if it was required to be paid, belongs to (or is distributable to) the beneficiary or beneficiaries? Should a plan's sponsor add a provision of this kind? Or is there some reason stating the provision would be unwise?

For my LL.M. students in my ERISA Fiduciary Responsibility course, next week’s lesson is about prohibited transactions and exemptions. As a part of that lesson, I explain that the ERISA § 408(b)(2) exemption is grounded on an assumption that an approving fiduciary gets enough information about a service provider’s services and compensation. With this, I explain that many disclosures that arguably meet what’s required under the 408b-2 rule don’t, practically, furnish information in a way that’s useful to the fiduciary’s decision-maker. I hope to show my students some real-world effects of the 408b-2 rule. To do so, I’d like to show them a contrast of disclosures: one that is short, clear, easy to read, and fulfills the purpose of furnishing useful information to an unknowledgeable fiduciary; and one that is too long, ambiguous, a pain-in-the-neck to read, and difficult to understand. So I hope BenefitsLink mavens will help me by attaching or linking here (or, to avoid putting something on the Internet, e-mailing me) some samples of “best” and “worst” disclosures. (I understand you might redact names and other identifying information to protect nonpublic information, or to avoid offending someone.) I’m looking for disclosures addressed to plans smaller than $50 million, and preferably including small and “micro” plans. Likewise, because the difficult issues often aren’t in a TPA’s disclosures, I’m looking for disclosures of investment brokers, insurance companies, or recordkeepers that get (and keep) “revenue-sharing” or indirect compensation. I don’t want to praise or embarrass anyone, so I’ll further redact and deidentify the illustrations before I show anything. Also, I’ll use the illustrations only for show-and-tell in the classroom, and won’t allow a student to keep anything.

My points were that the correct reading of the plan might not matter, and that the personal representative might not need to know which interpretation is correct to find a responsibility to pursue the estate's claim. But I didn't mean to impede anyone's curiosity about how to interpret the plan.

jpod, if your client is the personal representative of the participant/decedent's estate (and the plan or its administrator isn't), don't you: (1) submit your client's claim to the plan's administrator; (2) if it's denied, exhaust the plan's claims procedure; and (3) if it's still denied, provide to your client your candid advice to inform the personal representative's cost-benefit analysis about whether it makes sense (or doesn't) to pursue the claim in litigation? If the administrator followed the plan's claims procedure, is it likely a court would defer to the administrator's interpretation of the plan as long as the interpretation isn't implausible? Many courts' opinions have said an administrator's finding need not be the one the court would have made; rather, it need be only not so obviously wrong that it could not have been an exercise of the administrator's discretion to interpret the plan. But whatever might happen for step (3), wouldn't modest expense mean that a prudent personal representative should pursue the claim at least under the plan's claims procedure?

A former employee’s right to request that her badge be retired so she can keep it is provided by an agreement between the labor union and the government. At the outset of an EBSA investigation or inquiry, some practitioners consider it wise to see the examiner’s badge and personal-identity-verification card, and to write down the badge number. Some examiners don’t wait to be asked, and instead assume a fiduciary or service provider (or its attorney) will want to inspect the badge.

In this case [the complaint is attached in the originating post], the plan provides that an under-$5,000 distribution "shall be distributed[.]" If the plan's fiduciaries dislike the plan's provision, they might try to persuade those who have power to amend the plan to make a different provision. Until then, they should obey the plan's governing document unless doing so is inconsistent with ERISA. Whether the Labor department should use its discretionary enforcement powers to pursue the particular breaches described in the complaint is a question I'll leave to other minds.

My 2 cents, I wrote the bit you quote before seeing your note; and I wrote only about a difficulty in meeting a fiduciary's duty if the fiduciary has a discretionary power to decide whether to pay or omit a distribution. You rightly point out that a fiduciary's duty of communication might in some circumstances require a communication beyond those the statute commands.

The Secretary's complaint asks the court to order the breaching fiduciaries to restore the plan's losses that arise from the breach.

Even if such a grant of discretion can be provided without tripping on some tax-Code rule, one wonders that discretion might not make a fiduciary's lot much better. Under discretion, a fiduciary's decision not to provide a distribution might not be an obvious breach of an ERISA 404(a)(1)(D) duty to follow the plan's governing document. But a fiduciary must use her discretion for the exclusive purpose of providing the plan's benefit. And a fiduciary must incur only those expenses that are "necessary" expenses of the plan's administration. What prudent standards would a fiduciary use to decide not to pay a benefit the fiduciary is permitted to pay?

You might want your lawyer's advice about whether the court that ordered the division has sufficient jurisdiction over the plan's administrator to compel the administrator to perform the act (if any) the court ordered the administrator to do. States' laws vary widely about whether a proceeding that involves a State or local government must or need not be brought in a special-jurisdiction court, and what procedural conditions must be met in seeking relief against a government agency or official.

Is the "HRA" you ask about an ERISA-governed group health plan? Does the plan's governing document state an anti-alienation provision?

In the attached complaint, the Secretary of Labor asserts that a retirement plan's trustees (who also served as the plan's administrator) breached their duties by failing to pay or deliver involuntary distributions for participants who had a one-year break-in-service and a plan account less than $5,000. Beyond the harm of not paying benefits when due, the Secretary asserts the administrator's failure needlessly incurred per-participant service fees ($7 per quarter-year, and so $28 for a year) on individuals who ought not to have been participants. Acosta v Stapleton complaint.pdf

Yes. The rulemaking's cost-benefit analysis included assumptions that some retirement investors would, as results of the rule and related exemptions, get somewhat better advice, improve their investments, and so get higher account balances. Undoing or weakening the rule, or loosening the conditions of a prohibited-transaction exemption, would unravel those effects. Many commenters dispute both the methods and the assumptions of the economic analysis. That includes some who think the Labor department's analysis underestimated the benefits to retirement investors. Also, some believe the rulemaking should simply do the best interpretation of the statutes, without reconsidering the cost-benefit analysis and public-policy choices Congress already made.

The Labor department estimated the rule's aid to investors in the hundreds of billions for a ten-year period. A CBO estimate considers only whether a legislative proposal would result in an increase or decrease in the U.S. Government's "revenue" (most often, taxes) or expenditures.