Reporting ERISA Bond amount on the 5500

Hi to All,

This question is about what to report on the 5500 or 5500-SF as a client's bond coverage, depending upon the date one chooses.

I can find plenty of references that say that a bond coverage amount for purchasing purposes should be determined near the beginning of the year and should be based on the greatest amount of funds handled in the previous year.  What I can't find is a reference stating that the bond amount reported on the 5500 should be the amount in force.......as of when?  The first day of the plan year?  The last day of the plan year?

The reason it came up is that a plan had no bond in its first year of operations, calendar 2017.  The employer purchased an adequate bond on 02/01/2018, and renewed that bond on 02/01/2019.  The plan is subject to having an independent audit due to having over 100 participants.  The employer bought a Colonial Surety retroactive bond for the minimum amount possible ($10,000) to cover 2017.  Colonial will not sell a retroactive bond without having the subsequent years as well, so the employer paid for a total of 4 individual one year periods of coverage that run 11/01/2016-10/31/2017, 11/01/2017-10/31/2018, 11/30/2018-10/31/2019, and 11/01/2019-10/31/2020.  

The auditor is advising the client that he needs to decide whether or not to purchase more coverage for 2018 because of the one month, January 2018, for which he (now) has a $10,000 bond.  He actually needed a $150,000 bond on exactly 01/01/2018 and he bought one, from a different company, on 02/01/2018, but the auditor's position is that this is still not sufficient.  The auditor says that one might just let it go and not worry about it, were it nor for the fact that the plan is filing late which already draws attention to itself and reporting an inadequate bond amount would be just one more red flag.

That led to another question, one of general procedure.  We typically report on the 5500 the amount of coverage in force as of the end of the plan year, even though the amount is determined based on assets as of the first of the plan year.  During the year, our clients will increase their bond coverages if we have advised them to do so based on the prior year's annual report.  For example:  A client has a $20,000 bond for all of 2018.  We produce the annual report for 2018 sometime between 01/07/2019 and 09/14/2019.  At that time, we advise the client that based on their assets at the end of 2018, they need to increase the coverage in 2019 from $20,000 to $30,000.  The client dutifully complies and by 12/31/2019, the client has a $30,000 bond.  When it's time to prepare the 2019 5500-SF, do we report $20,000 as the bond amount because that's what they had on 01/01/2019, or do we report $30,000, because that's what they had by 12/31/2019?  Every place I have worked so far, we would report the $30,000 figure.

So the questions are:

1. Does this client really need to go to the extra expense to increase the Colonial 2018 bond for that one month (January) that they were out of compliance and 

2. When doing the 2018 5500, do we report the amount of coverage they actually had as of 01/01/2018 ($10,000) or the amount of coverage they had in force as of 12/31/2018 ($160,000)?

Thank you as always for your ideas.

Question 1: No.

Question 2: $160,000.

Comment: even if there was NO bond and you reported it correctly, the DOL would come back and say you have to get a bond and then you get it and they go away.  There is (almost) never any real penalties associated with bond issues so long as you have the right bond amount at some point.

Thanks, Larry!  You confirmed what we thought, but in a vacuum, we never know if we are right or not.