The SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 will expand the retirement plan toolkit available to employers that desire to enhance the plans available for their employees. As the new provisions become effective and as employers plan for the future, questions naturally arise.

The SECURE Act 2.0 of 2022 provides plan sponsors with a number of additional tools to enhance the attractiveness and effectiveness of their retirement plans.

In December of 2019, before COVID was in our daily vocabulary, President Trump signed the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act. The SECURE Act sought to increase access to retirement savings accounts and to protect American workers from outliving their retirement assets.

It has been widely reported that the Department of Labor (DOL) has published its new Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) final regulation. Depending on one’s perspective, that characterization ranges from somewhat accurate to quite inaccurate.

As we work closely with plan sponsors and participants in a challenging environment, we encounter common themes on the regulatory, plan administration, M&A, and data security fronts. We’ll provide fiduciary education around those items and an update on potential regulatory and legislative changes coming soon.

We’ve not been so lucky in 2022, as inflation has run rampant, equity markets have struggled mightily, and bond markets have offered no place to hide.

With litigation ramping up, the courts are providing guidance that will help #fiduciaries protect their plans and themselves. Our experts get into the details on this topic in this month’s Qualified Plan Advocate Newsletter. Check it out!

Earlier this summer, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) surprised the retirement plan world when it announced a new approach for narrowing the universe of plans seemingly worthy of its investigatory and audit resources. If your organization receives a letter under this new program, what will you do? Will you be prepared to respond? What if the answer is no?

This month’s article helps fiduciaries to understand the fallout from Hughes and to identify a series of best practices that reflect the lower courts’ application of Hughes.

The pace of change in the retirement plan industry suggests that plan sponsors and fiduciaries need access to information that will help them to: (i) comply with their fiduciary responsibilities; (ii) ask the right questions of their service providers; (iii) understand the additional participant tools and resources available in the marketplace; and (iv) implement those solutions in a way that will help to attract new employees, retain existing employees, and improve their overall financial wellbeing.