Principal Financial Group

[Guest trucks1]

Does anyone have any comments/concerns on the Principal Financial Group product, both bundled and unbundled? Any trouble getting data needed to complete reports, web site comments?

[alanm]

very expensive

[GBurns]

Whether Principal or some other provider, I would expect that you should have major problems getting such data.

The data might contain personally identifiable information or other info protected by Privacy Laws. As such I would expect most providers to be reluctant to give out this info without specific authority and permission. Even then I cannot see that you would have a valid purpose since any data massaging and reporting could be and most likely be best done by the provider.

[QDROphile]

GBurns:

Your answer only makes sense if you are talking about someone other than the plan fiduciary obtaining information from the provider and that should be proscribed by the contract with the provider, if not the provider's own policies. The plan fiduciary has responsibility for, and needs acess to, every piece of data collected by a services/record keeping provider, and no law restricts the fiduciary except ERISA. ERISA governs what the fiduciary can do with the data, which is to use it for plan administration. It is the plan fiduciary that hires the providers and this question looks to me like someone considering hiring Principal.

[GBurns]

I do not read this as being from a fiduciary, because a Fiduciary should have covered these requirements etc when preparing the RFP (or equivalent) or even before. I also would have expected more than 1 provider name if this was a fiduciary, so that comparisons could be included. I find it hard to think that a fiduciary is only interested in hearing about 1 company only or that they had the info on every other potential provider except this one.

[stephen]

perhaps trucks1 will clarify their request as I thought it was a TPA asking for information...