HollyB

It's the owner and one employee. It's an S Corp. so technically the owner is an employee too. The DB plan was terminated 12/31/17 and written notice was given 12/30/17. Verbal notice was given to the employee in mid-November but the regs. say it has to be written, which the consultant working with the employer didn't realize until about a week before the notice was given. By my calculation, that makes the excise tax $2800, which the business can't afford, but it's too small an amount to justify a PLR waiver request given the user fee for that. That's why I'm trying to see if there's another way to get the tax waived. The owner switched TPAs for 2018, so it took the new TPA about 5 days to prepare the notice and send it to the consultant for review. The consultant did the review and sent it to the employer the same day. The plan was way overfunded at termination and those assets were allocated to the owner and employee. I believe the 2017 accruals were calculated using full year compensation so I don't think there would be any additional accrual for the period from when the notice should have been given to when it was. Let me know if you have further questions about what occurred. Thanks.

I'm trying to find out if there's a way to either justify not filing a 5330 or file the 5330 without payment and request a waiver of the excise tax, which is quite significant, especially for an owner plus one employee plan. Everything I've found says the only way to get out of the excise tax is to request a waiver through a PLR request and the filing fee for a PLR is too high to make that a viable option. No tax has been assessed.

Does anyone know of a way to get the excise tax under IRC 4980F for a late 204(h) notice waived other than a letter ruling request? I can’t find any other way to get a waiver and the user fee is too high to make a letter ruling request a viable option. Thanks.

A tribal government can't have a 401(k) for employees providing government services (such as K-12 school employees, police and fire employees, courthouse employees, etc.), but it can have a 403(b) for some of those employees (e.g., the school employees). It also can have a governmental profit sharing plan for these employees with a pre-tax pick-up by the tribe of mandatory employee contributions, which mimics a 401(k) plan to a great extent. Those options apply to the tribe employees providing government services because the tribe is treated like a state government employer with respect to those employees. It can have a 401(k) for its employees providing commercial services (such as casino workers) because it's treated like a private employer with respect to employees providing non-governmental/commercial services.