"A client just sent me a Final Order of Garnishment from a US District Judge, demanding $X from a participant account for restitution and court-ordered interest. The order names the Participant as Defendant and the recordkeeper/custodian as 'Garnishee'. Nowhere does it mention the plan name. Anyone have any experience with this? I get that it's not the same as a QDRO, but shouldn't there at least be some basic standards it has to meet? I don't want to do anything that will put the plan sponsor in a bad position, either by paying out without proper due diligence or by rejecting it without good reason."

"An accountant is asking if he can just lower the W-2 compensation of the S-corp owner so that it's below the HPI threshold and that gets the owner out of the new Roth catch-up rule. Can they shift more income to the dividend K-1 and avoid the issue that simply? Sure, it lowers their overall employer benefit, but I suspect some will find that a fair trade-off."

"We are taking over a plan that uses the Relius document. We use DGEM/ASC. We don't have the Cycle 3 basic doc yet but we do have the PPA -- assuming not too many changes but wanted to confirm.

"They are a law practice where the staff is paid by the plan sponsor then two of the partners are paid through their PA and they are adopting employers....well that's the issue. We have the participation agreements from the PPA (one was 1/1/2026 and then one joined on 1/1/2017). The cycle 3 adoption agreement only lists the one that was added later on, the original one is mentioned nowhere (which is one of our issues). We asked for the participation agreements and they said the prior TPA told them: Our previous company advised that the agreements only needed to be signed once and did not require signatures upon restatement.

"We submitted a ticket with ASC and they responded: In the absence of executed participation or adoption agreements, we recommend reviewing the Relius plan document to determine how adopting employer participation and execution requirements were handled, as this will be key in evaluating whether separate execution by each employer was required.

"I am not that familiar with Relius, does anyone know if the basic plan document states the adopting employers are not required to sign off on plan restatements?"

"We administer a defined benefit plan and a 401(k) plan for a small employer. They have two shareholders (husband and wife) and 3 full time employees. Just the shareholders participate in the DB (passes 401(a)(26)). All participate in the 401(k) plan. The 3 non-shareholder employees get a 7.5% contribution in the 401(k) plan every year. Both plans together pass 401(a)(4).

"The DB plan has had and still has a benefit formula of 5% of FAC per year of participation. They want to increase benefits (with a fresh start of course) to 9% of FAC for each year of participation. Would this be considered discriminatory because the amendment itself is just raising benefits for HCEs? All other employees are excluded but are getting adequate contributions in the the 401(k) plan every year. Would this type of amendment be considered discriminatory?"

"The plan document states that catch-up contributions are not matched. In operation, the client uses a separate election for catch up contributions (regardless of the mandatory Roth catch up rules). The match is per pay period and there is no true up. No limit on deferrals.

"My understanding is that a catch up contribution is not a 'catch-up' until it exceeds a plan or statutory limit. The issue is that the plan's payroll provider has not been matching on any contributions that are in the elected catch up bucket. As an extreme example, let's consider 2 participants both over 50: Participant 1 elects only catch up deferrals and has $0 in the regular catch up election. Participant 2 elects only regular deferrals and $0 in the catch up election. Both employees defer a total of $7,500. Part. 1 gets no match and Part. 2 gets the full match.

"IMHO -- I think they both are owed the match because no plan or statutory limit has been exceeded. Wanted to see if anyone else had run into this situation, especially now that separate elections are an option for handling the mandatory Roth catch-ups. I have also considered that this impacts more than just the match allocation, because the $7,500 in deferrals should be included in the ADP test for participant 1, not to mention the 415 limits. Thoughts?"