In a Law360 article, I provided insight on the Department of Labor’s (DOL) proposed regulations on retirement plans that would make it easier for companies to join existing retirement plans or join forces to generate new ones – which has the potential to broaden the availability of workplace retirement plans to allowing small businesses. Under the proposed regulations, “a group of unrelated employers could now have a single ERISA plan,” I explained.
The DOL also advocates that the regulations would take away the burden of administering such plans as individual employers would not have to each act as a plan administrator. That burden, along with its accompanying fiduciary responsibilities, would fall instead on the employer association or firm that a company has outsourced its human resources tasks to, also known as a professional employer organization, that sponsors the plan, I explained. “In theory, someone else has all the headaches that goes with a retirement plan,” I noted.
The full article, “DOL Proposes Easing Retirement Plan Regulations,” was published by Law360 on October 22, 2018, and is available online.