Ever since defined contribution plans have come to dominate the retirement plan landscape, both plan sponsors and policymakers have grappled with how to help employees take a lifetime’s worth of savings and convert it into a sustainable source of retirement income. One way to help participants meet retirement income needs is to integrate guaranteed income products into defined contribution plan lineups. Fiduciaries have expressed concern, however, about potential liability they may face for the selection of annuity providers. The SECURE Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump on December 20, 2019, may help allay those concerns.
ML BeneBits
EXAMINING A RANGE OF EMPLOYEE BENEFITS
AND EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION ISSUES
AND EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION ISSUES
The SECURE Act—potentially the most impactful benefits legislation since the Pension Protection Act of 2006—was included in the bipartisan spending bill signed into law on December 20, 2019. The SECURE Act includes provisions that affect tax-qualified retirement plans and individual retirement accounts. Other provisions of the spending bill affect executive compensation and healthcare benefits.
Tax laws have long required that qualified retirement plans timely adopt written plan documents and amendments. But what evidence must a plan sponsor provide to an IRS auditor to prove that they have timely adopted a written plan document and required amendments? The IRS recently addressed this question in Chief Counsel Memorandum 2019 002 (the CCM), which advises that absent extraordinary circumstances, “. . . it is appropriate for IRS exam agents and others to pursue plan disqualification if a signed plan document cannot be produced by the taxpayer.”
On December 20, 2019, President Donald Trump signed into law the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020 (Act).
Sponsors of single employer defined benefit (DB) pension plans could be subject to higher-than-usual minimum funding contribution requirements over the next several years, for at least two reasons.
In the much anticipated decision State of Texas v. United States of America, et al., the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a district court ruling that the individual mandate under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is unconstitutional. Because the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 zeroed out the federal tax penalty under the individual mandate, effective January 1, 2019, the Fifth Circuit concluded that since there is no longer a penalty or tax resulting from the individual mandate, the mandate can no longer be sustained constitutionally under Congress’s taxing power.
In recent years, there has been an upward trend of regulators focusing on the issue of retirement plan participants not collecting retirement benefits upon reaching retirement age (and we have previously covered the final rule on the missing participants program on this blog). Although there are many reasons why individuals delay collection, in some cases, the individuals are not starting their benefit payments because they are “missing”—meaning the administrators of their retirement plans cannot locate them or the plans lack critical identifying information to locate them.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has released IRS Notice 2019-63, which provides a 30-day automatic extension to furnish to employees/covered individuals the 2019 IRS Forms 1095-B (Health Coverage) and 1095-C (Employer-Provided Health Insurance Offer and Coverage) from January 31, 2020 to March 2, 2020.
On December 4, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued Notice 2019-64, which contains the 2019 Required Amendments List for individually designed tax-qualified retirement plans. As background, the IRS issues its Required Amendments List each year to identify statutory and administrative changes to the tax qualification rules that may require sponsors of individually designed retirement plans to amend their plans to comply with the changes. In general, the deadline for adopting any required amendments on the list is the end of the second calendar year after the list is issued.
As concerns continue regarding the possibility of an economic downturn, plan sponsors should be aware of the effects that two potential downturn events could have on their qualified plans.