Demosthenes

Get a new broker. 1) Seems like the statement implies that "securities" (read stocks) are under some special protection. Mutual funds are securities! 2) If the assertion were true, no plan anywhere could change funds in any down market, if any participant objected. Have your broker quote chapter and verse of the applicable SEC regs. I'd be surprised if anything of that nature exists.

You need to check the bankruptcy laws in CA to be sure, but a typical scenario would be for the business to go into receivership and for the custody to move under the court appointed bankruptcy trustee. Your clients are then likely to be in a world of hurt since unraveling the assets is likely to be delayed by the rest of the bankruptcy proceedings. Not knowing the details, I can't comment on the difficulty of moving clients in whatever time may be left. However, IMO your best course of action is to find a TPA willing to take on all of your clients at one time. A migration as opposed to a one by one conversion to a new TPA. Even if the effort to find a successor doesn’t pan out, you should at least be able to demonstrate to your clients that you made a serious effort to get them out before the end.

Check Persumma out of Boston, MA. It's a JV between an insurance company and an e 401k start up, been around about a year? Ted Benna is involved, I think he sits on the board. The product is 100% brokerage window. State Street is pricey. Schwab's costs are reasonable, but they want to do the servicing and run all of the assets. They don't play well with others, so incorporating them into an exisiting program as a new option/offering is going to be tough. New player is T D Waterhouse, they've been making strides but I'm not sure how much is real and how much is still vaporware. Most of the discount brokers eTrade, Brown etc have some type of offering as well as most of the full blown wirehouses.

This is political grandstanding, good for some sound bites and a couple of paragraphs in the Boston media. Much sound and fury signifying nothing. Even if ERISA didn't pre-empt the legislation (which it does), the existence of thousands of corporations with multi state employees would make the administration a screaming nightmare.