Art of the Qualified Plan Audit

In our previous blog post, Pooled Employer Plans (PEPs): The Basics, we outlined the basics of a PEP and will not dig into the details of the financial reporting requirements for these plans. The administrator of a PEP must file an annual Form 5500, Annual Returns/Reports of Employee Benefit Plan, to which the PEP administrator … Continued

The IRS has announced cost-of-living adjustments that should be noted for retirement planning purposes. Below is a chart that outlines employee benefit plan limits for 2024: Plan Limits RETIREMENT & SOCIAL SECURITY 2024 Limit 2023 Limit 2022 Limit Section 401(k), 403(b), 457(b) Elective Deferrals $23,000 $22,500 $20,500 401(k) or 403(b) Catch-Up Contributions $7,500 $7,500 $6,500 … Continued

PEPs were established in section 101 of the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019 (SECURE Act), which amended ERISA and the IRC, to allow unrelated employers to join a defined contribution retirement plan maintained by a pooled plan provider (PPP) acting as the plan’s administrator and named fiduciary. A PEP, as … Continued

Originally published in the Summer 2023 Issue of Delaware Banker (Delaware Bankers Association). Let’s Start With the Basics – What is a Pooled Employer Plan (PEP)? PEPs were established in section 101 of the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019 (SECURE Act), which amended ERISA and the IRC, to allow unrelated … Continued

Nervous apprehension tends to overwhelm new 401(k) audit clients who don’t know how involved they will need to be in the document production for the audit. Often, they are hopeful that one or more of their service providers will “take care of everything” as they promised. The bottom line is that the extent of the … Continued

Death by a thousand cuts. That’s what initial 401(k) and 403(b) audit clients fear their first financial statement audit will feel like. Fear of the unknown leads the human mind to worst case scenarios. Could I fail the audit? Sure, anything is possible. Will I fail my first audit? Not likely. Even if the audit … Continued

Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) 136 addresses the auditor’s responsibility to form an opinion on the financial statements of employee benefit plans (EBPs) subject to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). It also addresses the form and content of the auditor’s report issued as a result of a full scope or an … Continued

In the past, innocent participants paid the price for their employers’ mistakes In our previous blog Give it BACK!!!”…”No!”…”OK, Keep It!, we described how the previous law required retirement plan fiduciaries to take reasonable action to recover any overpayment of plan benefits, even when the overpayment is generally the employer’s fault. Reasonable action meant an … Continued

Not Enough RMD Participants must take an Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) from retirement plans and IRAs. 403(b) plans often have more than one account in the name of each participant. While each 401(k) plan must issue its own RMDs, an individual can take one RMD distribution for the entire amount computed using the balances in … Continued

In its quest to Set Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement, SECURE 2.0 enhanced the Long-Term Part-Time (LTPT) rules of Secure 1.0 by making them applicable to 403(b) plans. Since employees are more likely to contribute to an employer-sponsored retirement arrangement than an Individual Retirement Account, and more Americans are working part-time since the pandemic, … Continued