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I work for a TPA (covered entity), and our legal office has a disagreement over whether we can disclose to the plan subscriber if an adult child is or is not enrolled on the subscriber's (the parent's) plan. I say that their enrollment information is PHI and we need approval from the adult child. Another attorney says it isn't PHI, and we can tell the parent who is enrolled on his/her plan. Please weigh in.

Hi to All, If you saw the John Hancock webinar today on the EPCRS program and how to use it, you will understand where my questions originate. There was a lot of coverage of enrollment errors and the corrections seemed quite complex. Actually I should have said that the corrections themselves are not that hard, once you can identify what kind of error it is, what kind of money is involved, how long ago the error occurred, whether or not automatic enrollment is a factor, etc. That's the harder part - figuring out which kind of error you have. My question is, how would I even know an error had occurred, and ultimately, who is responsible for figuring it out and correcting it? Our non-producing TPA shop does traditional, annual reporting for retirement plans of small employers. We are not usually involved in periodic enrollment meetings after the plan is established. Unless the employer volunteers the information or the participant complains to us, we would never know if someone was enrolled late. If the employer distributes an enrollment kit in May to someone who was eligible on January 1, and that person starts deferring on June 1, all I will ever see is the total deferred for the year and the total compensation for the year from the return of the annual census data. I don't ask and I am not given any data about when participants begin deferring. I suppose I could go look at each new person in the plan, if a platform like a John Hancock is involved, and see when deferrals commenced but even then, I wouldn't know if the person initially declined and then changed his mind later on. What are the rest of you doing? Are you closely involved with the enrollments of your client's employees? Do you collect copies of the enrollment forms or the forms declining the opportunity? Is this your responsibility as a TPA? Do you rely on the investment advisor to be on top of this? Outside of informing the client and the HR department (if any) of their responsibilities when the plan is first installed, do you follow up to see if procedures are actually being followed? My colleague here says he has done these corrections a number of times over the years, but it was because a savvy participant complained about not being enrolled properly, not because he as the TPA discovered the error or because the employer let him know there was a problem. I could probably count on one hand the number of times I made these calculations and it was so long ago I don't even remember the circumstances. We would like very much to know how other firms are handling this issue. Thank you.

Hi to All, John Hancock sends out an email every day with a list of alerts regarding plans we as the TPA have in common with them. They seem to think that it is "Urgent" when a plan has contributions that come in for participants who are not enrolled in the contract or have missing investment instructions. This is not the norm for most of the participants in most of our plans - if someone is employed and deliberately signs up to make deferrals, they usually choose investments too. However, sometimes a Safe Harbor 3% non-elective contribution or a profit sharing contribution gets deposited for participants who didn't choose to defer, are indeed not enrolled in the contract, and do not have any investment directions on file. How important is this? Is it a violation of something or another to have participants on default enrollment? What is John Hancock looking to us to do about it? Your observations and advice are appreciated, as always.