Pam Shoup

Is this a Stable Value Fund within an insurance product where the MVA is actually an option? Mechanically, the insurance company should be able to give you an estimate of the MVA and that amount could be deposited and pro-rated to the affected participants prior to their distributions as an earnings amount. All affected partcipants should be credited with the MVA amount. If it has a true stable value fund, have you applied for the waiver of the PUT? It will most likely not be granted, but it will start your 12 month clock. If it is a true stable value fund, there will not be an option for a MVA. With regard to your question above, on a plan conversion, we have seen Stable Value Funds accept assets from one recordkeeper to another, as long as it was either a transfer in kind for the SV fund, or some sort of transfer where they could put the money into the stable value fund, but maybe another share class. Maybe this is what they are referring to for those that transfer to their auto IRA or to an IRA provider that leaves the money in the stable value fund. In this case though, you still have the issue of those who choose to cash out or or roll to another institution not being treated the same way.

We started on FDP as well. We left to go to Investlink and then returned to Relius. Did you know that a lot of the old FDP hot keys still work in Relius?

If you are not already part of the RVUG (Retirement Virtual Users Group), I highly recommend that you join it. They have quarterly online training sessions (which cost all of $25). The sessions have been very informative and the website is a great way to interact with other users/ask questions. https://www.rvug.org/ It is free to sign up. They had a session all about using the portal and have been doing some updates to it based upon our feedback. If you are not already signed up for weekly alerts from the Portal, I would also sign up for those as a lot of information is disseminated that way.

I do have a question. Is this paycheck truly severance pay or is it for pay earned up to the minute of termination, plus any pay they were entitled to (Vacation, PTO, etc.) as a result of their employment, that was paid after their last day of work? Most employees have a paycheck or two after their last day of work that would be considered as compensation they actually earned and those pays would require deferrals/match, unless the employee executed a new Salary Reduction Agreement. True Severance pay would be monies paid as a result of their termination, that was not otherwise earned, and therefore not compensation for plan purposes.

The Long-Term Part-Time employee rules do not (currently) go into effect until 2024. You use the plan's provisions now for eligibility to make contributions and receive the match. Vesting provisions would also follow the plan rules. It is my understanding that the rules are not completely clear on vesting for any employer contributions for LTPT ees once the LTPT provisions go into effect. I believe that we are waiting on further guidance on that issue.

If this is for a participant directed plan, you are going to need to update the 404a-5 notice and distribute that notice 30 days prior to the effective date of the change. You can add a cover letter to the notice that it is being updated for fee changes.

Are you ASP or installed? If you are ASP, you can go to Utilities / Update Global Tables from the main menu and run the update. (I could never find the two tables they referenced so I just went with the update button and it seemed to work.) You don't need to manually enter any numbers. The first time you run the update, it will update to the currrent month. Afterwards, you MUST run the utility every month. Also, the disclosure reports cannot currently be appended to a crystal report, do print in SSN order and do print for all participants, even those with a zero balance. The last RVUG virtual conference did a review of how to edit the crystal report to at least do them in alpha order and remove the zero balance people. RVUG posted the last webinar on their site and you should be able to access it for free. The third hour of the webinar has a demo of how to update the report. Reiius told us in the webinar that they are placing the rates in the Tables by the 5th of each month.

Most likely yes. We serve as Plan Sponsor, Recordkeeper, Plan Administrator to a PEP. We use an unrelated TPA firm who performs compliance (TPA) services and an outside 3(38) advisory firm who chooses/monitors the fund lineup for the PEP. Each employer can work work with their own 3(21) advisor if they choose. There is a separate trust company. There was a lot of setup/coordination and money involved to get it off the ground. With that being said though, a PEP is not the be all end all for many employers. If they like a lot of hand holding and consulting services, a PEP may not be right for them. Your brand/message may be what is needed for your market. We got into the PEP market because we spent 20+ years working with PEOs and/or closed MEPS, before sponsoring an Open MEP. We took our Open MEP and migrated to the PEP environment. Over the years, we created proprietary software to manage these plans. If you don't have an lot of experience in the market, you may also want to take that into consideration before making the leap.

I would include a section in your service agreement about what you will produce after a contract termination and if there is a fee to produce it. Since we are also a RK, there is a lot of information for us to provide for that purpose. For the compliance part, we include the 2 most recent 5500s/8955SSAs/5558s (if applicable), Basic Plan Document, Adoption Agreement, Trust, SPD, any amendments, etc., a copy of the most recently completed plan tests and a vesting report for the most recently completed year. If they want more data than that, then the cost is xxx/hour to produce wtih a minimum fee of one hour. I very rarely get asked for more than that for compliance and it hands off the data for the new provider to start for the next plan year. It also sets the expectations early.

As an open architecture recordkeeper, there are literally thousands of funds on our system. We are not the investment advisors. From a recordkeeper's processing point of view, fund companies are constantly making changes and oftentimes, there is very little or no warning sent to the recordkeeper. This includes share class changes, fund name changes and the total changeover of some funds. We may get an email from the NSCC custodian that says, "XYZ fund company closed the R share of this fund and transferred all of the shares into the A share and this the result of that transaction for this list of plans", and then you have to go into your system and enter the trades that were done at the fund company level to match your recordkeeping system. We will then update the 404a-5 notice and send it to the employer with instructions to distribute it to the participants with a note that this notice has been updated to reflect the change done by the fund company from X to Y. My question is, where is the plan's financial representative in all of this? The rep should have been on top of any fund change in the plans that s/he services. We will sometimes get contacted by a rep telling us of an upcoming change and we will have a discussion about what the plan wants to do.

We have not seen any update on this either, and my IT department is not happy that we have to use IE to go into Relius either.

1. I like knowing that I am not the only one experiencing some of the issues presented. 2. I have been able to help out others, and others have helped point me in the right direction. 3. Daily reminders that there are very few things in our industry that are black and white. 4. I often see things addressed here before other message boards catch up them.

The old Relius.Net. I use my old login credentials to get into that site. I tried the new website and I couldn't find anything relevant there under Support.

Yes. If you go to the Relius Support page, they have a Quick Start Guide for the Long Term Part Time employees. Unfortunately, this guide does not seem to be posted in the Help screens inside of Relius.

We have a participant who took a Covid loan in 2020. The plan permits two loans only for the purpose of re-financing. He does not have enough available with the (reduced) $50,000 limitation to re-finance and extend out for another five years. He could re-finance and have it paid off by the original due date. So this is my question, since this was a Covid loan, the original due date was essentially 6 years (5+1). With a refinance of a Covid loan, are we to use the original due date of 5 years out or the extended Covid due date?

I am not sure that I understand the question. Is this a COVID loan that was taken last year, or a previous loan that was suspended last year and has been extended one year from the orignal loan payoff date, or a COVID loan that is being re-financed or something else?

Participant directed, trustee directed, safe harbor plan (match or non-elective), auto enrollment (what type) . . . . . ?

The short answer is Yes, you can sign the 5500 if you are named as the Plan Administrator in the plan document. With that being said though, you should consult with your ERISA attorney, make sure that your service agreement is clear on the duties you have taken on, and make sure that you have systems (and insurance) in place to deal with your 3(16) responsibilities. You may also want to review IRS form 8822-B.

If you look at I.R.B. 2002-51, Question 20 is a good example of how this is to be handled. The new loan replaces the old loan and can for 5 years. However, you have to take both the old loan AND the new loan amount into account at the same time when applying the limits.

I recommend A-lign. https://a-lign.com/ We us them for our SOC audit and they are professional and their fees are reasonable.

You want may to check with your software provider that you use to provide the plan testing/produce your current statements. They may be planning on adding a statement option with the lifetime dislcosure. If not, you may need to outsource the service. If you use Relius, they have a statement providing service that you can use. Since we do recordkeeping of partcipant directed plans, we use SS&C for our quarterly reports, and we can add our annually valued plans to our quarterly plans extracts and produce the new version of the statements. Broadridge also has a service for statements. I am interested to hear if anyone else is using any other statement companies.

Send the document to the employer. Don't get involved in anything else, unless compensated. It sounds to me like they are going to be in trouble in a few years and you don't want someone trying to say that you are liable. In the future, you may want to include in your 408b-2 that there is an exit fee and that a standard set of documentations will be furnished for that fee (5500s for two years, plan documents, SPD, trust, etc.). We include everything on our list that a new provider should need to use to prepare the 5500 for the time period in the plan that the plan was under our control and if they ask for more, tell them there is a fee. We include language on the exit package that we no longer sponsor the document once it leaves us and make sure we put in writing the last 5500 we are responsible for preparing.

Although it sounds like a great idea to process the loan as of the date the loan was requested, you most likley won't be able to submit the "Sell" order from the investment funds in your daily valuation software for more than 50% of the current VAB. You have a couple of choices, if he is close . . . wait for a few days for the market to change and/or another payroll contribution to be made, or do new loan paperwork. In the future, you may want to set a procedure for howyour organization handles max loans for people who may run into this issue.

Yolanda - I am not sure which question are you asking. Are you looking to "Pool" the assets of your plans and having an investment professional manage the assets? Or, are you looking for a Pooled Employer Plan arrangment where you have one or more plans that will be joining another plan with multiple employers and gaining a Pooled Plan Provider that is the plan sponsor, Plan Administrator and the Plan Fiduciary for the plan operations, as well as the possibility of a 3(38) financial advisor who has the fiduciary responsibilty for the plan assets?

RBG - how do you prove that the balance on the credit card is solely due to eligible medical expenses? Also, with credit services like Care Credit, you can use that card to pay the veterinarian, for massages, cosmetic services and other things that are not eligible medical expenses. I may be splitting hairs but once you let a participant take a hardship to pay a credit card balance that may be partially atributable to an eligible medical expense, you can really open hardship withdrawals to abuse. With that being said, I am curious to know if anyone on the panel has had an audit where any (large plan or government) auditor asked a lot of questions about the evidence presented for a hardship. Also, is anyone lettting participants self-certify hardship withdrwals using a Substantiation Form or something similar?