Many companies sponsoring 401(k) plans may not be aware that they’re facing a critical regulatory deadline on August 30.
That’s the federal deadline for disclosing to employees the amounts of fees that they’re paying for their plans. The overwhelming majority of these investors don’t have the vaguest idea how much they’re paying in fees. If you’re an employer at a small or mid-sized company, there’s a good chance that you don’t either.
That’s right. Fees, one of the biggest determinants of whether 401(k) plans make or lose money for investors, are a big question mark. For decades, this has been neglected by employers, employees and federal regulators. This state of affairs has been fine for service providers, including the large insurance companies that package up these plans and supply them to employers. After all, less disclosure means less attention paid by investors, and higher fees for lack of comparison shopping.
Because of new federal rules that expand and reinforce existing regulations and reverse years of lax regulatory enforcement, all of this is changing. Employees will soon be informed exactly how much money is being deducted from their 401(k) accounts to pay fees. They’ll learn of these fees this fall in their account statements, as required by the new federal rules.
Previously, these statements merely showed investment account totals after fees were taken out, so employees likely attributed low returns to poor investment performance rather than damage done by fees.
The amounts of these fees shown in the statements will doubtless come as a rude surprise to many employees, sending them streaming into your company’s HR department. They won’t be smiling.
If you’re following federal rules, however, your employees will already know about these fees when they receive their accounts statements. The new rules require employers to send employees a simple document showing fees in an easy-to-understand format by August 30. This way, the fall account statements won’t come as a shock to employees. Employers are also required to determine whether these fees are reasonable relative to the broad market.
By adopting and enforcing the new rules, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is shedding light on not only the fees service providers are charging, but also the quality of these plans.
For example, if plans are paying a service provider substantial fees but employees receive little, if any, education on how to construct and maintain their portfolios within their plans, this makes for the worst of all possible scenarios: high fees and poor service, resulting in low potential for good investment returns.
Without reasonable fees and knowledge of how to use their plans, employees can’t be effective in serving as their own financial planners, which is essentially their role as 401(k) investors.
Employers are required to prepare the disclosures due this month from information that they should have received by now from service providers.
But many employers, doubtless, will be between a rock and a hard place. While employers are on the hook for clear disclosure this month according to a set format, the new rules don’t require service providers to provide this kind of clarity when they supply the fee information to employers.
Regardless of their size, companies that fail to comply with the new rules may be hit with severe fines and other sanctions. This prospect is intimidating, but the sweeping new regulations should be viewed as an opportunity to make your plan work better for workers and management alike, possibly while lowering fees.
After determining what your plan’s fees are and what you’re getting in return, you’re required to determine whether they’re reasonable by benchmarking them against the current national market.
You may well find that you can get better service with lower fees – improving employees’ understanding of plans and increasing net returns after fees are taken out of their accounts.
But first, employers face rigors surrounding the disclosures of the coming weeks.
To deal with these challenges:
1. If you haven’t done so already, get to work pronto on the fee disclosures due August 30. The first step is to determine whether your service providers have fulfilled their regulatory obligations by supplying the fee information – including the specific services being provided for each amount – to your company.
2. If you’ve received this information, set to work interpreting these documents. This can be a lot tougher than it sounds, as some plan providers are burying pertinent information in lengthy documents. If, at the outset, this task seems too difficult or time-consuming, consider hiring an independent fiduciary advisor to assist you with this, as well as with benchmarking your fees against the market. Using a fiduciary can significantly reduce your company’s liability.
3. If service providers have failed to supply the required fee information, document this by writing to them and requesting speedy submission. This can insulate you from liability for not disclosing the information to employees on time. If these providers don’t respond immediately (after all, the deadline is fast approaching), protect your company by blowing the whistle on them with the DOL.
4. Prior to making the fee disclosures this month to employees, notify them in meetings and/or in emails of what is coming their way. Tell them this is the first step in a process to review – and, possibly, to lower – fees and to improve service, including the provision of better plan education. Again, an independent advisor can help with this.
5. Throughout this notification/disclosure process, document all questions that employees ask and the answers they receive. This helps manage your legal and regulatory liability, and it helps you develop the best answers to give when the same questions come up again.
If you haven’t started this process or are behind schedule, don’t think about water that’s passed under the bridge. Instead, look upstream. Even the sternest of regulators will acknowledge that well-meaning efforts to comply, however belated, are far better than inaction or ignorance of the new rules.
Anthony Kippins is president of Retirement Plan Advisors, Ltd., a Registered Investment Advisory firm that addresses the needs of retirement plans and the employees who invest in them.
An Accredited Investment Fiduciary Analyst (AIFA®) with more than 30 years of experience domestically and abroad, Kippins specializes in providing fiduciary advice to retirement plans on governance, investments and educational services. He also advises individual clients on retirement planning and investment management after retirement.
Kippins also serves as managing director of Institutional Fiduciary Assurance LLC, an organization that provides fiduciary advice to trustees of endowments, foundations, non-profit organizations and charitable trusts. He can be reached at [email protected].
