Friday, November 06, 2009 | Robert A. (Rob) Browning
Filed under:
Distributions, 401(k) Plans, Qualified Retirement Plans
Under recent IRS guidance, sponsors of many defined contribution plans must decide, by November 30, 2009, how to handle required minimum distributions (“RMDs”) for the 2009 calendar year. Participants who have already received 2009 distributions that consisted of (or included) a 2009 RMD have until this same date to roll that RMD into an IRA or eligible retirement plan in a tax-free rollover.
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Tuesday, February 10, 2009 | Gregory L. Ash
Filed under:
Distributions
In an effort to cushion the blow to retirement savings inflicted by the stock market crash, former President Bush signed the Worker, Retiree and Employer Recovery Act of 2008 (“WRERA” or the “Act”) on December 23, 2008. Although the Act provides some much-needed funding relief for sponsors of defined benefit plans, its attempt to help retirees under defined contribution plans will leave the sponsors of those plans reaching for a bottle of aspirin.
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Monday, September 01, 2008 | David Stevens
Filed under:
Distributions, Participant Communications, Plan Administration
Plan administrators should review and update the written notices they send to participants when making distributions from their retirement plans. Recent changes in the law have expanded the rollover options available to recipients of such distributions, and these should be reflected in the notice.
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Tuesday, July 01, 2008 | Gregory L. Ash
Filed under:
Distributions, Fiduciary Duties
Plan sponsors and retirement plan service providers each have reason to be concerned about a recent decision in an ERISA lawsuit pending before a federal court in Iowa. That decision allowed former participants in two separate 401(k) plans to proceed with their claims that the Principal Financial Group, the third-party service provider for each plan, breached its fiduciary duties by encouraging retired participants to roll their plan accounts into high-cost IRA products affiliated with Principal. (Young v. Principal Financial Group, Inc.) Although the court rejected one of the participants’ theories of relief on the grounds that they did not have standing to pursue it, a second theory survived.
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Friday, June 01, 2007 | Kenneth A. Mason
Filed under:
Distributions, 401(k) Plans, Qualified Retirement Plans
When the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (“EGTRRA”) created the concept of a “Roth 401(k) contribution,” things got off to a slow start. For one thing, it was not at all clear how the Roth IRA concept, which has been around for some time, would be transplanted to an employer-sponsored plan.
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Thursday, February 01, 2007 | Kenneth A. Mason
Filed under:
Distributions, Pension Plans, Qualified Retirement Plans
As we reported in our November issue of Benefits in Brief, many provisions of last year’s Pension Protection Act (“PPA”) became effective on January 1, 2007. The IRS has now issued a “grab bag”of guidance on certain of those provisions, primarily dealing with distribution issues.
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Wednesday, November 01, 2006 | Lawrence Jenab
Filed under:
Distributions, 401(k) Plans, 403(b) Plans, Legislation, Participant Communications, Pension Plans, Plan Investments
As you probably already know, President Bush signed the Pension Protection Act of 2006 (the “PPA”) into law on August 17, 2006. Some PPA provisions became effective as of the date of enactment; others preserve existing laws that were set to expire in 2010; and still others are not effective until mid-2007 or 2008. This article summarizes some of the important provisions of the PPA that are effective as of plan years beginning on or after January 1, 2007 – or which apply to distributions, notices, or other events that will occur on or after that date.
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Saturday, July 01, 2006 | Kenneth A. Mason
Filed under:
Distributions, 401(k) Plans, Fiduciary Duties, Qualified Retirement Plans
In the context of final regulations concerning abandoned defined contribution plans (so-called “orphan plans”), the Department of Labor (“DOL”) has also clarified its 2004 guidance on the permissible means of distributing accounts of participants and beneficiaries who cannot be located at the time of a plan’s termination. Although these orphan plan regulations are primarily of interest to banks, insurers, and mutual fund companies that hold assets of abandoned plans, plan sponsors and administrators will also benefit from the regulations’ “missing participant” provisions.
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