States and even municipalities across the country are taking an increasingly active role in addressing the nation’s retirement preparedness crisis. From California’s CalSavers Retirement Savings Program originating as early as 2012 to the Maine Retirement Savings Program enacted only a few weeks ago, many states – and even municipalities like New York
The 2021 Advisory Council on Employee Welfare and Pension Benefit Plans has announced that it will examine brokerage windows in participant-directed individual account retirement plans that are covered by ERISA. The work of the Council is designed to assist the Department of Labor’s effort to determine whether more guidance would be appropriate and necessary to
Retirement plans may have thousands of participants and billions of dollars in plan assets. Unfortunately, these large sums of money are attractive to bad actors who look to prey on unknowing victims by fraudulently accessing funds. Plan administrators, as fiduciaries of retirement plans, are wise to understand their legal obligations and best practices related to
The Seventh Circuit has issued its decision in the much-anticipated case of Divane v. Northwestern. The district court below had refused to allow plaintiffs to proceed with breach of fiduciary duty and prohibited transaction claims based on the recordkeeper’s use of participant data for purposes of “cross-marketing” non-plan services to plan participants. The issue
In a prior post, we commented on the growing trend of fiduciaries making non-monetary concessions to settle ERISA fee litigation cases. We observed that certain “onerus” non-monetary settlement features – such as obligating fiduciaries to provide plaintiffs’ counsel with customized reports on plan operations and performance during a years-long “monitoring” period — are significant
As the bellwether cases in the ERISA actuarial assumptions litigation approach the end of the motion to dismiss stage, this is a good time to step back and assess how they are proceeding.
Test cases of this sort tend to unfold in phases.
Many Americans use prescription drugs on a daily basis to control or prevent a wide variety of illnesses. However, the increasing costs of prescription drugs make it hard for many Americans to obtain the medications they require. One way to combat this is through the use of manufacturer coupons. The process is simple. A manufacturer
There always seem to be enough open important questions to keep ERISA practitioners operating in some uncertainty. When new legislation or regulatory guidance is not forthcoming, ERISA practitioners only have the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts to look to for assistance. Although the Supreme Court usually takes either zero or one ERISA cases
Workforce reductions seem to be an inescapable consequence of economic downturns. Whether this occurs through the sale of a business, layoffs or plant closures, employers too often overlook the potential impact on their employer-sponsored retirement plans. Unfortunately, failure to recognize and timely address the retirement plan implications of a reduction
Some economists are now predicting a global economic downturn as soon as 2020, as indicators from bonds, interest rates, currencies, and commodities signal declining growth, including the recent inversion of the yield curve. While there is not a consensus on this point (as George Bernard Shaw once said, “if all economists