plan sponsor
What Happens When The Last 401k Plan Fiduciary Disappears?
When an employer disappears, who becomes the abandoned 401k plan fiduciary? The answer isn’t necessarily the recordkeeper, the trustee, or even the person who happens to have the keys to the former employer’s office. In fact, the answer may depend on how the company went out of business in the first place. There are several […] Read Full Article
Does Retirement Plan Proxy Voting Choice Change Who Owns The Vote?
Making a feature visible, however, does not necessarily make it a controlling investment criterion. A fiduciary may have reason to understand how participant-directed or sponsor-directed voting works without allowing the presence or absence of the feature to overwhelm the investment analysis itself.
When Participant Preferences Collide With Fiduciary Judgment
What participants want may be relevant to the employer’s decision, but that does not necessarily invoke ERISA’s exclusive-purpose requirement.
When Retirement Plan Leakage Never Leaves the System
That is the other side of the leakage equation. Keeping assets inside a plan may preserve an investment structure that benefits the former employee, but doing so can transfer costs, obligations and risks back to the employer.
Switching Costs Can Quietly Shift Power Away From Plan Sponsors
None of those tasks necessarily prevents a plan sponsor from making a change, but collectively they can make the decision considerably more complicated than comparing price and service.
How Recordkeepers Became 401k Gatekeepers
As bundled platforms spread, the recordkeeper’s technology became the environment in which the plan lived. The platform did not merely keep records of decisions made elsewhere; it increasingly determined how those decisions could be implemented and presented.
Will Raising Retirement Plan Limits Really Help Rank-And-File Employees?
Conflicting economic priorities create a problem legislation cannot solve merely by adjusting a number in the tax code. Increasing contribution capacity will not revive a benefit structure that no longer fits the decisions employers and employees actually make.
Is Your 401k Auto-Enrollment Success Story Incomplete?
The idea of 401k auto-enrollment may be one of the greatest innovations in retirement plan history—or one of its greatest illusions. Few plan design features have done more to increase participation. Yet participation and retirement readiness are not synonymous, and confusing the two may create what can only be described as the Auto-Enrollment Paradox. The […] Read Full Article
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