"I am a member of the Directors Guild of America [DGA]. I work as a production manager running television shows for various studios and production companies. I have an S-corp/loan out company that receives fees for my services. Besides those fees, my S-corp also receives residual payments from previous shows that make up a smaller part of my income. My S-corp pays me a W-2 salary and distributions. I do not own a controlling interest in any of the companies I production manage for, and I don't have an overall managerial role in any of these companies. I run one show at a time for these various companies that produce dozens of shows at a time (Netflix, Paramount, NBCUniversal, etc). For retirement, I have two defined contribution plans:

1. DGA Supplemental Plan: A multi-employer money purchase plan. The employer (production company/studio) makes contributions to the plan. In addition, there are mandatory after-tax employee contributions (not salary deferrals) fed into the plan. In my case, a payroll company deducts these employee contributions from the payments to my S-corp. My S-corp is not signatory to the DGA and has not made/will never make any direct contributions to the DGA Pension Plans.
2. One-Participant 401k Plan: I am the only participant. All of the elective deferrals, profit-sharing contributions, and VAT contributions are calculated properly, and the VAT -- -> Roth 401k conversions are done to the letter. There have been no Section 402(g) or Section 415(c) excesses.

"The newest version of the DGA Summary Pension book has a poorly written section about the possibility of aggregating a member's loan-out defined contribution plan and the DGA Supplemental Plan's contributions under one Section 415(c) limit in certain circumstances if the member terminates their plan before the DGA Supp plan pays its benefits at retirement. It goes on to imply that this aggregation will only triggered if the S-corp/loan-out contributes directly to the DGA Supp Plan. However, the wording is so vague that I want to be 100% certain it only gets triggered if my S-corp/loan-out contributes directly....

"I can understand aggregating the limits if my S-corp made direct contributions to the DGA Pension Plans. However, is there any precedent for aggregating the limits in a situation like mine, where that didn't happen?"

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"In the past 1 1/2 months, both Houses of Congress passed a bill intended to provide a safe harbor if an outside expert did a valuation of the stock. I have not seen anything further about it. Did the President sign or veto the billl? If neither, doesn't the Constitution treat it as enacted if the President fails to take action (i.e., sign or veto) the bill?"

"Suppose a participant did a direct transfer rollover from a terminated defined benefit plan into the company 401(k) plan and subsequently terminated employment. If the 401(k) plan normal form of benefit is a cash lump sum, must the terminated participant's benefit elections contain a QJSA option. In other words, since a portion of their benefit will be a rollover from a prior defined benefit plan, does the participant's entire 401(k) plan benefit need to retain the annuity provisions of the rolled over pension benefit?"

"Client is a dissolved company with 21 shareholders. Safe harbor and profit sharing contributions to 401k plan have not been made yet for 2025. Plan is terminated and all employees/shareholders have rolled over their account balances. The company has no money left. Currently working on reaching out to shareholders to make capital contributions, but many of the former shareholders have gone MIA. I thought of maybe having the termination undone, rescinding the safe harbor status of the plan and conduct testing, in order to get out of the company having to make over $300k in safe harbor contributions, but the recordkeeper confirmed that there are no assets remaining in the plan. Pretty sure you can't undo a termination if there are no assets. Any ideas are welcome."

"Our company is considering entering the Pooled Employer Plan (PEP) business as a PPP and recordkeeper. A couple questions: [1] Who are the main plan document providers for PEP documents? [2] Is there a Cycle 4 Pre-Approved PEP document? [3] What is the format of PEP documents that would have just a few Adopting Employers? Main Document + Each Adopting Employer sign documents, or just each Adopting Employer?"

"Can a safe harbor plan be amended mid-year to disallow super catch-up contributions? In other words, is such considered a prohibited mid-year change? Based on my reading of Notice 2016-16, the answer appears to be no, so long as the notice and election opportunity conditions are satisfied. Is that correct?"