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:…

Attorneys would define a Safe Harbor as a provision of a statute or a regulation that specifies that certain conduct will be deemed not to violate a given rule. In our ERISA world, a Safe Harbor is a provision of the retirement plan law  that can  cut through the sometimes fog of ERISA and provide fiduciary protection to plan sponsors and at the same time make their retirement plans more efficient and effective.  Here is…

Compensation for employees is some variation of taxable wages reported on Form W-2. For allocation purposes, the employer or payroll provider downloads the census and compensation data based on the plan’s definition of compensation into a spreadsheet at the end of the year. It’s a little more complicated, of course, but let’s leave it at that for purposes of this post. But if you’re a sole proprietor, partner in a partnership, or member of an…

Kids can certainly outgrow their clothes, and so can employers with their retirement plans. A SIMPLE-IRA may have worked in the beginning, but if you want to change to a 401(k) plan in 2019, November 2 is the deadline to take action. Employers must provide notice to their employees by that date that 2018 will be the last year for the SIMPLE; and that it will be replaced by a 401(k) plan. Why change from…

If you’re in the retirement plan business, you’ve heard the term “audit roulette”.  It refers to the belief by some employers that the odds of their retirement plan getting audited by the IRS are in their favor. Well, those odds are getting worse. The IRS is taking technology to the next level using  “data driven decisions”.…

The conventional wisdom is that you can wait until the end of the year to put a retirement plan in place since you can still get the tax benefits for the whole year. Maybe for some purposes, but not for setting up a Safe Harbor 401(k) plan. If you want to set up a new Safe Harbor 401(k) plan for 2018, it has to be done by October 1. What’s a Safe Harbor plan? It’s a special…