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" If your welfare plan (medical, dental, life insurance, disability, etc) has under 100 participants at the beginning of the year, you are exempt from filing Form 5500 if it is (a) unfunded, (b) fully insured, or (c) a combination of insured and unfunded. But wait, there’s more. The instructions to the 5500 toss in the following: "see 29CFR 2520.104-20." If you whip out your copy of the CFR, you will see an "and", as in "and for which, in the case of an insured plan—— (i) Refunds, to which contributing participants are entitled, are returned to them within three months of receipt by the employer or employee organization, and (ii) Contributing participants are informed upon entry into the plan of the provisions of the plan concerning the allocation of refunds." Based on the above rules for insured plans with under 100 participants being exempt from 5500 filing - has anyone run into someone getting fine for failure to file it they failed to address refund allocations? Did MLR requirements from the ACA address this enough that having the refund allocation detail in the SPD is unnecessary to still have the 5500 exemption? Has anyone ever had this issue come up post MLR/ACA as a road block to small fully insured plan exemption? I ask because I see many small insured plans that are not filing and do NOT have any reference to refunds or refund allocations. Some are claiming the MLR rules negate this since they dictate the refunds.

The situation is simple. Nowadays many people will roll their retirement funds (401k, 403b, IRA, etc.) into a ROBS account to self-fund a business. So imagine for a moment, you take out retirement funds, self-fund a business. The business technically is 95% owned by your Retirement Accounts (call them 401k for simplicity) and 5% funded by you. As a business owner, you take an SBA loan, your bank of course never gives the correct amount of working capital, so you end up using personal credit cards, personal funds, etc. to help your business succeed. And in fact your business does succeed. But you are left in the unenviable position of being essentially bankrupt. But you have a business that has a great chance of success. You still have monies in your 401k funds. And to survive you need to consider personal (not business) bankruptcy as your debts exceed your ability to pay them. And you are not taking a salary from your business because it needs the working capital to continue growing successfully. So the question becomes, if this individual files for personal bankruptcy, and if there 401k retirement funds are protected, and it so happens that the 401k owns 95% of the business, is that business protected?? The question posed here - Is a 401k funded business (ROBS) protected or exempt from personal bankruptcy???