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An ERISA rule—29 C.F.R. § 2550.404a-5—calls an administrator of an individual-account retirement plan that provides participant-directed investment (even if no fiduciary seeks ERISA § 404(c) relief) to furnish regularly a disclosure document that meets several requirements specified in the rule. Although the rule’s command applies to a plan’s administrator, for most plans a recordkeeper or other service provider does the work—not only in delivering the notice but also in assembling the notice’s investment-related information and other disclosures. What happens if a plan’s administrator wants the delivery service but not the assembly service? Imagine that a plan’s sponsor/administrator is unwilling to adopt its recordkeeper’s standard 404a-5 notice. And using the part the recordkeeper allows its customer to customize won’t fix the problem. The customer is willing, at its effort and expense, to write its own 404a-5 notice, retrieve and insert the investment information, and deliver to the recordkeeper by a sharp cut-off date two days after each quarter-close, the print-display file of the 404a-5 notice to be delivered. The page count and other technical points conform to what the recordkeeper does normally. The plan’s administrator accepts responsibility for its communication, and the sponsor/administrator exonerates and indemnifies the recordkeeper for relying on the administrator’s instruction. In your experience, does a recordkeeper: deliver the customer-prepared notice? refuse to deliver an outside-prepared 404a-5 notice because doing so would be too much disruption to the recordkeeper’s work methods? Does the response vary with the size of the customer? If so, how big must a plan be to get this delivery service?

If you're assembling a plan's rule 404a-5 disclosure to participants ... Do you include or omit a money-market fund's seven-day yield? If you include it, what is your reasoning for showing it? (I assume there is no one inarguably right or wrong answer. Rather, I hope to get some sense of customs of recordkeepers and TPAs.)

A plan's administrator is pulling together its disclosure under 29 C.F.R. 2550.404a-5. Looking toward the plan year that begins with January 2017, the administrator will send a set of plan communications (some of which meet a 30 days' notice condition) by November 2016, and include in that set a 404a-5 disclosure. In that disclosure, must the investment alternatives' past-performance information be for the 1-, 5-, and 10-calendar-year periods ended December 31, 2015? Or may the past-performance information be for the 1-, 5-, and 10-year periods ended September 30, 2016?

For an individual-account retirement plan, an SEC-registered investment adviser is provided to all participants, without any incremental charge. (The employer/administrator approves an arrangement in which the recordkeeper pays the investment adviser. The recordkeeper gets its money as indirect compensation paid by investment funds' distributors, transfer agents, and managers. Assume everyone involved has done thorough 408b-2 disclosures.) The investment adviser's fee thus is not a charge against a participant's account that is not reflected in the total annual operating expenses of an investment fund. What, if anything, should a participant-level 404a-5 disclosure say about the arrangement for the investment adviser's services?