Fiduciary Is Fun!
(a.k.a. I heart taxes)
(a.k.a. I heart taxes)
The qualified plan world is tricky, and if you are a regular reader of my blog, you undoubtedly already know this. After 25 years working with retirement plans, I like to think that I have seen many if not most of the problems, and I have. However, sometimes I forget about a problem for a long time until it resurfaces. I am working on one such problem now.
In the tax exempt (or 403(b)) retirement world, it is not uncommon for employees to have individual contracts with companies such as TIAA, AIG, Lincoln, or other providers of tax-sheltered accounts. However, what has happened over the last many years is the organizations that sponsor these plans have begun to move toward what I’ll call “single contracts” for their retirement plans. Rather than have each employee maintain their own retirement contract, the employer holds all the retirement assets in a single contract for the benefit of the employees. This is how the 401k world works. The problem on which I am currently working involves an organization that moved from these individual accounts to a single contract. What is interesting is that when they moved they did not, and could not, require all the individuals to move their money into the single contract. Some employees did, but many did not. When the new provider began recordkeeping the plan, they did not account for several employees who had these individual contracts as they could not track them on their recordkeeping system. So, what’s the big deal? Where is the problem? In this case, the employer moved to the new provider when they had less than 100 employees. Over time the firm grew, but not to the point where they needed an audit, or so they thought, and I know you know what’s coming next…. When you add in the individuals who were not being tracked because they had individual accounts, the plan did, in fact, become subject to the Form 5500 audit requirement. An honest mistake, you might say. No big deal. An honest foul. We’ll fix it going forward . Ya, well, the DOL doesn’t quite see it that way. The penalty is $150 per day up to $50,000 for each Form 5500 when the auditor’s report is deficient. Suffice to say that if the audit isn’t even done, it’s deficient. What are we doing now? Well, I am working on becoming the advisor on the plan because the current advisor didn’t even know about this. I am also working with the attorney who has been hired to engage the DOL and IRS to seek to mitigate penalties. We will soon be working with the plan’s recordkeeper to amend returns, and we are obviously reaching out to a CPA firm. This is a huge mess for the employer, who quite honestly is just trying to execute on its tax-exempt mission and doesn’t really have money to fix this. Concerned that maybe your advisor doesn’t fully understand the myriad of rules that apply to your plan? Give me a call and let’s have a conversation. Problems have a way of sneaking up on you! Pete Welsh a/k/a 401kGuy
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