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General Cable Snaps Plaintiffs' ERISA Stock Drop Claims
"[T]he alleged knowledge of an artificially high stock price was rooted in the fact that the company had not disclosed that employees of its foreign subsidiaries had violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1997 (FCPA) by paying bribes to foreign government officials. The plaintiff alleged that the stock was thus an imprudent investment, and defendants breached their various fiduciary duties in continuing to offer the stock to plan participants." [Eley v. General Cable Corp., No. 17-45 (N.D. Ky. July 23, 2018)]
planadviser
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Growing Number of States Establish Best Interest Fiduciary Regs
"With the judicial defeat of the Obama-era DOL fiduciary rule hanging in the air, individual states are moving to establish their own best interest regulations for the sale and service of investment products; attorneys warn that more piecemeal regulation is likely, as are lawsuits to test some complex ERISA preemption issues."
planadviser
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Mind the Coverage Gap
"Would 'open multiple employer plans' (MEPs) or 'pooled employer plans' (PEPs) encourage thousands of small employers to offer their workers a retirement plan for the first time? Or would these umbrella 401(k) plans ... mainly recruit and enroll employers that already offer plans? ... Would these relatively new types of plans significantly shrink America's coverage gap -- the fact that about half of full-time private-sector US workers lack a tax-deferred savings plan at work -- or would they just rearrange and 'cannibalize' existing market share?"
Retirement Income Journal
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IRS Allows Rollover Despite Deceased Spouse's Failure to Designate a Beneficiary
"The decedent was a participant in an eligible 457 retirement plan[,] ... died before reaching the age of distribution [and] did not designate a beneficiary under the retirement plan, making the decedent's estate the beneficiary of the account.... The IRS concluded [in PLR 201821008] that the taxpayer can be treated as having received the distribution from the plan which was eligible to be rolled over into a personal IRA account."
Butterfield Schechter LLP
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Practical Issues for Phased Retirement
"Questions for which answers should be provided in writing include: What will be done and how work will be delivered? ... What and when you will be paid? What limits, if any, are there regarding your rights to work for others? If data are needed, who will provide the information, on what timeline, who will analyze it, and who is responsible for its quality? ... Who covers overhead? It is also crucial to document issues like confidentiality, intellectual property rights, limits on liability, non-compete provisions, and process and protection in the event of disputes."
Pension Research Council, The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania
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Will Congress Pass a 2018 Retirement Bill?
"[M]ost observers seemed to dismiss the idea that legislation of any kind would gain traction this year. There seems little reason to think retirement benefits would be an exception. But of late, interest in making individual tax breaks permanent just might pull retirement bills along for the ride."
Conduent
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Americans Have Been Saving Much More Than Thought, New Data Show
"The saving rate over 2016 and 2017 is now pegged at an average 6.7 percent, up from a previously reported 4.2 percent.... Most of the revision to savings in recent years came about because small-business owners and other proprietors made more money to salt away, not because workers got bigger wage increases."
Bloomberg
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[Opinion]
Comments by NASRA, NCPERS and NCTR on ASB Actuarial Standards of Practice No. 4 Exposure Draft (PDF)
"[1] ASOP 51 already provides a robust framework for the assessment of risk, and the Investment Risk Defeasement Measure (IRDM) is a poor measure of risk ... [2] The intended purpose and application of an IRDM is unclear, particularly for risk-sharing plans ... [3] Requiring pension plans to pay for the calculation of a value that, in many cases, is of marginal utility, is unreasonable and may violate public pension fiduciary duties.... [4] The Investment Risk Defeasement Measure conflicts with the actuarial standard that standards should not be prescriptive ... [5] Requiring calculation of an IRDM may be a result of the ASB not following its traditional processes for proposing ASOP modifications."
National Association of State Retirement Administrators [NASRA], National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems [NCPERS], and National Council on Teacher Retirement [NCTR]
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Benefits in General
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Ninth Circuit Addresses Whether to Enforce an Agreement to Arbitrate ERISA Claims
"The Ninth Circuit analogized the plaintiffs in this case to plaintiffs in a qui tam action brought on behalf of the U.S. Government under the False Claims Act.... The Court stated that individual agreements to arbitrate do not extend to qui tam actions because those are brought on behalf of the government by the plaintiffs. Similarly, the Court said, an ERISA Section 502(a)(2) breach of fiduciary duty claim is brought on behalf of an ERISA plan by its participants." [Munro v. Univ. of Southern Calif., No. 17-55550 (9th Cir. July 24, 2018)]
Seyfarth Shaw LLP
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Pension/OPEB 2018 Assumption and Disclosure Study, with Analysis of New Accounting Standards Updates (PDF)
29 pages. "The 2017 median discount rate for pension plans in the study decreased 48 basis points since 2016 and more than two and half percentage points since 2007 ... Median plan funding levels increased from 2016, with pension plan assets equal to approximately 86% of the projected benefit obligation (PBO) in 2017 compared to 82% in 2016.... The 2017 median discount rate for OPEB plans in the study decreased 42 basis points since 2016 and more than two and a half percentage points since 200 ... The percentage of funded OPEB plans in the study has remained nearly unchanged since 2007 with 52% of plans being funded in 2017 compared with 49% in 2016 and 52% in 2007."
PwC
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Selected Discussions on the BenefitsLink Message Boards
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Federal Work Study Students Considered 'Employees' Eligible to Participate in 401(k) Plan?
Are federal work study students considered "employees" and eligible to join the 401(k) Plan? The document does not specifically exclude this group. These individuals while they are working for the employer are "students" and are not eligible for any benefits offered by the employer. I am trying to locate some regulation/guideline that provides these individual are not considered employees for purposes of the plan.
BenefitsLink Message Boards
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BenefitsLink Retirement Plans Newsletter, ISSN no. 1536-9587. Copyright 2018 BenefitsLink.com, Inc. All materials contained in this newsletter are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of BenefitsLink.com, Inc., or in the case of third party materials, the owner of those materials. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notices from copies of the content.
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