Compliance Stuff

Missing participants are a pain point for plan sponsors as they create a long-term liability for the plan, add to costs and incur fiduciary risk. The Department of Labor (DOL) is aggressively investigating the practices and procedures of plan sponsors for locating and distributing benefits to missing participants. In some cases, the DOL has asserted breaches of fiduciary duty for failure to perform regular searches for missing and unresponsive participants. In January 2021, the DOL at long last posted best practices for finding those missing participants and how to document the necessary steps taken. In January 2025, the DOL issued a temporary enforcement policy to allow plans to send, or escheat, small account balances for missing participants to a state’s unclaimed property program.    Missing participants can be defined as:  Participants and beneficiaries for whom the plan administrator does not have a valid address or contact information.  Individuals ...

  On Labor Day 50 years ago, President Gerald Ford signed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) into law. ERISA , a long time in the making, has had notable successes—but also has led to much litigation and perhaps even contributed to the decline of pension plans. Congress drafted and revised the law after Studebaker closed its plant in South Bend, Ind., in 1963 and left many employees without the pensions they had been promised. ERISA has “accomplished much of what it set out to do,” said Lou Mazawey, an attorney with Groom Law Group in Washington, D.C. “Without ERISA, there would be far fewer workers with retirement savings and far fewer workers with robust health insurance,” said Juliana Reno, an attorney with Venable in New York City. However, ERISA also has become a weapon for plaintiffs’ attorneys to wield against retirement plan administrators and others in court. “We have seen in the past 10 years an explosion of litigation challenging the fees and investment...