The SECURE Act represents some of the most significant changes to retirement plan law since the passage of the Pension Protection Act of 2006, over thirteen years ago. The provisions of the Act are broad ranging and span many different effective dates.
Maintaining a retirement plan for your employees is no easy task. At various points during the year, employers and HR departments field participant questions, help with enrollments, deliver notices and statements, and participate in the distribution process. However, an additional responsibility, and one of the most important, is the collection of data that is used for compliance testing and government reporting. Though all these duties are important, one task drastically affects the outcome of your compliance testing; accurate reporting of all employee information to your third-party administrator. Sound onerous? Not really.
There has been a large amount of upheaval in the retirement world as of late and it centers around the "F" word. And by "f" word, I mean "fiduciary." The New Fiduciary Rule means that many professionals in the finance world that weren't previously considered fiduciaries will now have to take on that title. So, why is that such a bad thing? Well, it's not per se, but the implications of how this may change the way the retirement financial business and its institutions function may have many cursing its name for a myriad of reasons. But before we get too bent out of shape, let's break it down and see what we're truly looking at.
The Department of Labor (DOL) fiduciary rule, delayed from the original April 10, 2017 deadline, expands the ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act) definition of “investment advice fiduciary” so that every financial professional working with retirement plans would be held accountable as a fiduciary of the plan.
I am a small business owner sponsoring a 401k retirement plan. Are my personal assets at risk? What kind of coverage can I get with Fiduciary Liability Insurance and how does it differ from the required ERISA Fidelity Bond?