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Employee Benefits Jobs
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Webcasts and Conferences
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Hand-picked links to the web's best news articles, official guidance, jobs, webcasts and more.
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[Guidance Overview]
Final PBGC Regs Make Numerous Changes to Premium Payment Rules (PDF)
"The regulations ... [1] simplify and streamline PBGC premium due dates, [2] coordinate the due dates for terminating plans with the termination process, [3] make conforming changes to the variable-rate premium rules, [4] clarify the computation of the premium funding target reduce the maximum penalty for delinquent filers that self-correct, [5] expand premium penalty relief, and [6] make technical changes to reflect the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP- 21). These new rules are generally effective for 2014 and later plan years."
(Groom Law Group)
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[Guidance Overview]
Supreme Court: Inherited IRAs are NOT 'Retirement Accounts' ... and What This Means For You
"The question for many now is, 'How can I keep my hard-earned money away from my children's (or other beneficiaries') creditors after I'm gone?' For some, state law may provide protection.... If -- and this is a big if -- a trust is drafted properly, certain requirements are met and the trust contains appropriate spendthrift language, it can help shield the trust assets (like an inherited IRA) from your trust beneficiaries' creditors while still allowing the trust to stretch distributions from the inherited IRA out over the oldest applicable trust beneficiary's life expectancy. There are a lot of potential downsides to consider when naming a trust as your IRA beneficiary, though." [Clark v. Rameker, Trustee, No. 13-299 (S. Ct. June 12, 2014)]
(The Slott Report)
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[Guidance Overview]
401(k) Plan Fix-It Guide, Updated June 17, 2014 (PDF)
52 pages. Chart and detailed discussions: Mistake, Find the Mistake, Fix the Mistake, Avoid the Mistake. Also includes brief overview of 401(k) Plans and of EPCRS.
(Internal Revenue Service [IRS])
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[Guidance Overview]
Does a Terminating Pre-approved Plan Need To Be Restated for PPA?
"Plans do not need to be restated for PPA, even when being submitted to the IRS for a determination letter upon termination using Form 5310 ... However, if a plan is not being submitted to the IRS for a determination letter on plan termination, then we recommend that the plan be restated, whenever possible, onto a PPA pre-approved document. This way the employer can be assured the plan language satisfies the changes made by PPA (and the other changes in the law that are included in the PPA document)."
(SunGard Relius)
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Issues in Representing Pensions Funds in Real Estate Transactions (PDF)
"Many of the biggest differences between transactions with pension funds as opposed to other entities revolve around tax issues. The funds and their title-holding entities are exempt from Federal taxes, but the Federal exemption does not necessarily translate to an exemption from state taxes ... Private pension funds are subject to tax on 'unrelated' income (UBTI) and, although public funds are probably not (there is some disagreement), they usually want to avoid it as well. Thus, in any acquisition with pension funds, counsel must review the income sources to insure no UBTI is present."
(Seyfarth Shaw LLP)
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Retirement Plan Loans: Borrowing Against Your Future (PDF)
"Nearly one-third (29 percent) of Americans who participate in a retirement plan say they have taken out a loan from the savings in their plan. Among those who took out a loan, 43 percent have taken out two or more loans. Forty-four percent of those who have borrowed against their retirement plan savings regret the decision. An additional 23 percent of respondents do not regret taking out the loan but would not do it again in the future."
(TIAA-CREF)
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Why Millennials Still Don't Save Enough
"While eight in 10 millennials say the recession taught them the importance of saving for the future, only 55 percent of the 1,639 millennials surveyed have actually started saving for retirement.... Medical debt ... stands out as a surprising problem for millennials. Despite their youth, many have faced significant amounts of health-related costs, which continue to dog them."
(U.S. News & World Report)
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Five Retirement Plans Every Financial Advisor Should Know
"[1] The DB/DC combination: Imagine a client would like to set up a pension plan for himself, but not all his employees. Can he do this? ... [2] Imagine a client has a large gain in year one and would like to defer the tax, but is not sure about future gains. What can you do? In the Pension Protection Act of 2006, Congress placed into the code section 404(o) ... [3] The Revenue Ruling Rule 2014-2015 captive ... [4] The 'self-directed' IRA ... [5] The 'Thousand Oaks' transaction: How would you like to sell your small business and not pay a tax? Perhaps defer?"
(ProducersWEB)
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How to Boost Your Social Security Check by 76 Percent
"Marriage vastly increases the number of variables in the filing decision, and simple Social Security calculators aren't designed for much complexity. It gets dicier still for those with special cases, such as couples separated widely by age, or spouses of government employees who haven't paid into Social Security. Taking all this into account, as well as data on income and savings, the new tools guide users through the options in what the companies say is a more advanced, comprehensive approach."
(Bloomberg)
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CalSTRS Gets $5 Billion Increase Over Seven Years
"Full funding of the troubled California State Teachers Retirement System was approved by the Legislature last weekend, with most of the additional $5 billion coming from school districts that get no offsetting money from the state. With only one 'no' vote, lawmakers approved Gov. Brown's plan to phase in a massive rate increase over seven years, nearly doubling the $5.8 billion CalSTRS currently receives each year from school districts, teachers and the state."
(Calpensions)
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Text of EBRI Testimony to ERISA Advisory Council: The Impact of Leakages on 401(k) Accumulations at Retirement Age (PDF)
31 pages. Excerpt: "[R]etirement balances from 401(k) plans, and IRA rollovers originating in 401(k) plans, may be increased substantially for young employees with thirty or more years of eligibility if cashouts at job turnover, hardship withdrawals (and the accompanying suspension of contributions) and plan loan defaults were substantially reduced or eliminated. However, this analysis needs to be accompanied by a very strong caveat that, prior to policy making, there are clear data gaps that will need to be filled."
(Jack VanDerhei, Ph.D., for the Employee Benefit Research Institute [EBRI])
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Loyal to a De-Fault
"Question: How often do participants quit target-date fund (TDF) strategies? Answer: Pretty infrequently! ... About 2% appear to quit because they hold only target-date and company stock funds. Did the plan sponsor make a matching or profit-sharing contribution in employer stock? Another 2% are using the managed account program at the end of the period. Did these participants choose custom advice? Bottom line -- only 12% of target-date fund users quit the product and constructed their own portfolios."
(Vanguard)
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[Opinion]
'COBRA's Mother' Takes on Wall Street in Fight Over 401(k)s
"Phyllis Borzi spent decades helping invent ways to protect people from unpleasant surprises in their health and retirement plans. Never did she run into the kind of resistance finance firms have mustered against her latest idea. And rarely has the industry met a bureaucrat so difficult to shut down."
(Bloomberg)
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Benefits in General; Executive Compensation
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IRS Announces Section 409A Compliance Initiative Project; A Self-Audit Would Be Prudent
"[E]mployers ... should have all their nonqualified deferred compensation plans reviewed for operational and documentary compliance with Section 409A. By doing so, employers will be able to identify Section 409A violations and be eligible to voluntarily correct the violations under the Section 409A Voluntary Correction Program. Once the plan, employer, or executive is under audit, however, the plan will not be eligible to voluntarily correct for any Section 409A operational or documentary violations, and the plan participants may be subject to immediate taxation of all vested deferred amounts and the Section 409A 20 percent penalty."
(Ford & Harrison LLP)
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Press Releases
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