"Please confirm who must contribute catch-up as Roth in 2026 - those with FICA wages of $145,000+ for 2025 or those with $150,000+ in 2025 or 2026? This should be the most simple determination in all of pension regulations but some sources seem to be wrong or misleading in their wording."

"As we all know the IRS got rid of the 'Flexible' match where you can just say the match is discretionary and come up with any formula operationally. The FT document has an option for a discretionary match (8a) where the options are 'as a uniform percentage of Matched Employee Contributions' (which is of course the normal one) or 'as a flat dollar amount for each Participant, which of course we don't really see. Here is my issue. I cannot find anywhere that, with respect to the 'uniform percentage of Matched Employee Contributions', I am able to cap the Matched Employee Contributions at X%. So everyone has a match expressed as X% of the first Y% contributed (e.g., 50% of the first 6%). I cannot find anywhere in this document that I can include the Y% / 6% cap in my examples. Has anyone noticed this? People always say, 'you can get to the same outcome if you use the maximum match section and cap the match at 3%' -- that only works if you never change the match so it's not a great solution. To be honest, this was a real issue for me in the FT 401k plan as well, Cycle 3. I am very curious to know if they finally figured this out for Cycle 4. As a sanity check I am just really hopeful other people have seen this too? Or maybe I'm missing something?"

"Recordkeeper paid advisory fees to a financial services company for the first three quarters of 2025. The financial services company paid the advisor fee to the advisor for the plan. Advisor left the service of the financial services company in Q4 of 2025 and moved to financial services company #2. Plan Sponsor and financial svcs company have a dispute and financial services company agrees to refund advisory fees for Q1-Q3 2025 ($6500) Here's the issue -- financial service company made check out to the plan sponsor's company, not to the plan. Plan sponsor then deposited the check into their corporate bank account. Do we have a prohibited transaction situation? Or can the money just get pulled from the corp bank acct, put back into the plan (participant accounts) and document what occurred in the plan records and move on?"

"We have a pooled plan that we just found out the sponsor did not deposit the 2024 safe harbor contribution. I believe we have until 12/31/2026 to correct this error, but the sponsor must put in in lost earnings from 12/31/2025. I've calculated the year to date earnings on the trust to be 0.88% which is lower than the DOL VFCP calculator. Can I use the actual rate or do we have to use the higher of the actual or the DOL calculator?"

"I started at my job in Colorado at a small business in November of last year. I am the owner's EA, and I do a little of everything. My past positions I have had some minor HR experience, mostly payroll/time tracking/record keeping/PEO admin. I have extremely limited knowledge on retirement accounts on either employee or employer side, and my boss knows this. When my boss set up a Roth IRA (Vestwell Colorado SecureSavings) at the end of 2024, he told current employees and employees he hired after, that we were matching 3% of all employee contributions to their IRA. Maybe he thought it was happening automatically, but it never did because it was the kind of IRA that didn't allow employer contributions. I don't think he knew any of this until I had an employee ask me why their contributions weren't being matched, so I looked into it. We recently switched over to a Human Interest 401k Safe Harbor plan, and my boss asked me if we can make up for all the missed IRA employer contributions in late 2024/2025/early 2026 by adding them to employee plans off-cycle. That isn't possible, so I am trying to figure out other options we have.

• We cannot add off-cycle contributions.
• We cannot edit employee matching percentages (his idea was to change the percentages until the funds were equal to our missing match).
• Our account manager at HI said an option is to use a "Profit Sharing" feature of our plan, but would not be able to do so until early 2027.

He doesn't want to just cut checks, but I'm not sure that's the way to do it anyway. Like I said, I have very little knowledge of retirement accounts and am feeling 100% lost, hence my username. Any ideas on this?"