Automatic Enrollment and automatic contribution increases

[Guest philc]

Articles and studies about plans providing automatic enrollment and automatic deferral increases are constant. Legislation is pending addressing these issues.

Automatic enrollment has been around for a while and is an option in most prototype documents. But automatic deferral increases is a fairly new thought and not contemplated when most prototypes were amended for GUST, etc.

Question - in order for an employer to utilize the automatic deferral increases, do you feel the plan document must specifically permit these increases? Or do you think if it's included in an annual notice (perhaps in the annual auto enroll notice if that too is being used) and in the SPD, that would suffice?

For those who may have employers using the automatic deferral increases, what have you/sponsors been doing?

[four01kman]

I think you have to have the plan provide for the automatic increases