Plan Merger

Can a money purchase plan be merged with a profit sharing plan

before 7/31/22, so only one plan must be amended for cycle 3 restatement?

As long as you don't have any 411 cutback issues with the MP plan and you preserve the MP characteristics of the MP source money in the surviving PS plan I don't see why not.

Agree with Lou S. We did a number of these 20+ (?) years ago when MP plans were rendered effectively useless due to PS max increasing from 15% to 25%.  

To state again the key is to preserve the MP characteristics of that money.   The big one is the MP money has a lot more rules on when and how distributions can be offered than a PSP.  That can be a bit of a pain as you have to make sure people are trained to not just treat this money as part of the PSP.  Back when I did those decades ago it was like running an MP within the PSP except no more contributions were being made to that part of the plan. 

Thank you

One other thing do I have to do any amendments to the money purchase plan?

No amendments were done since the PPA restatement

One additional point to the earliest responses is that you have to provide for the money purchase portion only that the joint and survivor annuity and spousal consent requirements are satisfied. In response to your question on whether any post PPA amendments need to be added to the MP portion, look at the required amendment lists with respect to laws enacted since PPA. There may also be some optional provisions that the client might want to add, especially those that make the money purchase portion more readily available (such as the ability to take in-service distributions at age 59 1/2 (added by the same law containing the SECURE Act (but in a different division of that law).

To clarify rocknrolls2 response, you don't need to do any interim amendments to the money purchase pension plan before it is merged into the profit sharing plan. The updated language in the profit sharing plan will also apply to the money purchase pension subaccounts in the merged plan as applicable. You don't say if you're talking about a pre-approved plan merging into another pre-approved plan but I'm assuming that since you refer to the Cycle 3 restatement deadline. Since the Required Amendment lists apply to individually designed plans, I don't think you need to worry about checking those if you're talking about pre-approved plans.  

We also did a number of these mergers years ago when MPPPs were no longer needed to increase annual contribution amounts.

Thank you