PArticipants Statements Electronically?

[austin3515]

Can someone point me to a good write up of when you can send statemetns electronically?

We work with a recordkeeper who we converted a bunch of plans too. New recordkeeper essentially has no email addresses. But yet they do not send statements. Instead they say we deliver them electronically.

To me this sounds way off-base and I would love to point to some DOL document that clarifies that this does not work.

[hr for me]

Don't know if this will help but my husband's personal 401k with a very large recordkeeper (one of the very well known ones in the industry) has an electronic statement that is available after he/ I log into that account. That way you have to have a login/password to get to the information, which might be more secure than an email or a snail mail copy.

The employee count is close to 50k employees for that one plan. It does not get snail-mailed or emailed to us at all. I think they do have an option to get a paper copy, but there might be an administrative fee for it. They do have his email address though to send confirmations for transfers/deferral changes, etc. But they don't use it to email any periodic statements at all.

(off topic) I will say from having to deal with over 1000 email address for cllents in a totally different business that the email management process can be a bear because of returns -- just like paper statement returns or sometimes even worse since the email addresses sometimes are easy to tag back to the real person.. At least sometimes paper statements get forwarded by the USPS. I am sure larger companies have a process for it, but it can get unmanageable. And having the participant access to the statement when they want it might be a better more useful process.

[ESOP Guy]

Are you thinking something like this?

https://www.dol.gov/ebsa/newsroom/tr11-03.html

https://www.relius.net/News/TechnicalUpdateDetails.aspx?T=P&1=1&ID=886

http://www.relius.net/News/TechnicalUpdateDetails.aspx?T=P&1=1&ID=659