The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act known as the “CARES Act” passed on March 27, 2020 provides $2 trillion in financial relief to individual taxpayers and loans and other concessions to businesses. The Act also includes several provisions affecting retirement plans which we will cover in later blog posts. For now, we’ll focus on two important provisions that can benefit participants in 401(k)and profit sharing plans: The normal 10% early distribution penalty is…

This is the first in a series of articles on the retirement plan changes that are part of the SECURE Act. The $1.4 trillion appropriations package signed into law by President Trump on December 20, 2019 designed to fund federal agencies through September of this year contained the most significant legislative enhancements to retirement plans in over 10 years. These law changes designed to encourage retirement savings are bundled up in one of those Congressional…

Service providers for 401(k) and other retirement plans require access to personal data on participants including name, age, address, date of hire, compensation and possibly social security number to provide recordkeeping services. Are these plan service providers simply taking advantage of a business opportunity or are they improperly exploiting information that is a  plan asset that plan fiduciaries must protect?…

If you’re an employer who has adopted a pre-approved defined benefit pension plan, it’s time to amend and restate your plan. All defined benefit plans using pre-approved plan documents must restate their plan before April 30, 2020. It’s important that you understand why your plan document must be restated. What follows is a non-technical explanation in Question and Answer format.…

Here’s a not unusual scenario for Baby Boomers who have reached their company’s retirement age but are not quite ready to retire. Why not start a business or even buy a franchise? That can require a large personal investment, but he or she has a sizable 401(k) account. Why not use those funds to start a second career? Here’s how they work.…

  The  passage of the Tax Reform and Jobs Act (“TRJA”) in 2018 made entity selection an important part of tax planning. The TRJA made fundamental changes affecting individual and entity tax rates. Combined with corporate transactions for strategic reasons and business owners acquiring interests in other companies, we’re seeing businesses and owners using multiple entities. And that’s where the elephant in the room gets into the act. The elephant being the complex set of…

Defined  benefit plans may have markedly declined (44% since 1975 according to the Department of Labor), but they haven’t become any more understandable to employers. Indeed, the IRS continues to find the same type of mistakes during audit examinations. Here are the ones that made the IRS Top Ten list:…