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Treasury Official Gives Favorable Interpretation of 401(k) Hardship Amendment Deadlines for Volume Submitter and Prototype Plans And suggests there may be more to come At the ASPPA Annual Conference on Tuesday, October 22, 2019, Carol Weiser, Benefits Tax Counsel at the Treasury, discussed recent concerns about the deadline for preapproved plans to amend to conform to the recently published final hardship regulations. In effect, she said that the deadline is the due date of the employer’s income tax return (e.g., Form 1120), plus extensions, if any, for the tax year which includes January 1, 2020. This is true even if the amendment was put into effect in 2019. This gives us more time than many of us had feared, based on a conservative reading of the final regulation. She gave three examples to illustrate Treasury’s view. In each case, assume the employer is a C corporation and the corporation does not extend the return. Assume a plan sponsor with a calendar year fiscal year implemented the mandatory changes of the regulations in 2019. The deadline is the due date of the 2020 return (April 15, 2021). Assume a plan sponsor implemented all of the changes on June 1, 2019 and has a fiscal year and plan year that ends June 30. The deadline is the due date of the employer’s return for the tax year ending June 30, 2020 (October 15, 2020). Assume a plan sponsor delays implementation of the mandatory changes of the regulations to the latest possible date, which is distributions made on or after January 1, 2020. If the plan sponsor has a tax year that begins on February 1, then the change to the plan would be effective for the fiscal year beginning February 1, 2019 and ending January 31, 2020. (May 15, 2020). She added “We are still looking at whether there is anything else we should be doing to consider whether [the third situation] is perhaps too short a time frame given when we were able to issue the final regulations – so something that we are still looking at, so stay tuned for that.” This offers the prospect of a later announcement of a later, or perhaps fixed deadline, unrelated to tax return due dates. While Ms Weiser prefaced her comments that this was not an “official” pronouncement of the Treasury, the context of the statements put to rest the concerns of those in attendance that the deadlines for calendar year taxpayers might be in early 2020. https://www.erisapedia.com/static/HardshipAmendmentDeadline.pdf

Calendar year plan - we filed Form 5558 to extend the 5500 and the 5330 for a client. Now we find that the late deferrals were not for 2017 but instead were for 2015 and 2016. The client is asking to not file Form 5330 for 2017 because no late deposit of deferrals for that plan year. Are there consequences for extending Form 5330 and then not filing one? Thanks.

Does anyone know if the hurricane extension applies to a TPA firm that is preparing the 5500 if they are in the declared disaster area? I can't find info on this. Thanks!

Hi, I am relatively new to this site and if I am asking the wrong question in the wrong place, I hope someone will say so! I thought I posted this question yesterday and it seems to have disappeared. If a client's 2016 corporate tax return is on extension from March 15th of 2017 to September 15th of 2017, normally speaking, the client would have until September 14th of 2017 to make the final 2016 contribution deposits such as match, profit sharing and Safe Harbor. Now, with Hurricane Irma relief, the client's corporate return does not have to be filed until January 31st, 2018. Does that mean that the client now has up until January 30, 2018 to make his final 2016 contribution deposits? Thanks in advance for any advice!