As it relates to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) employer reporting process, good faith compliance is soon ending. Although the IRS provided some relief related to the deadlines for delivering ACA reporting forms to employees, it has reiterated what employers had feared: good faith relief is ending. Until now, every year since federal law has required ACA reporting forms, the IRS took the position that it would not Read More

In Waldner v. Natixis Investment Managers LP et al., filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, a federal judge refused to grant the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case in December of 2021. Plaintiff plan participants filed the lawsuit as a proposed class action alleging Natixis Investment Managers LP (“Natixis”), a French corporate and investment bank, of violating ERISA and federal Read More

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, as amended (ERISA), is a federal law that sets minimum standards for most voluntarily established retirement and health plans in private industry. The primary purpose of ERISA is to protect the individuals who participate in these plans. From the circuit courts to the Supreme Court, there was no shortage of cases involving employee health plans in 2021. For Read More

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, as amended (ERISA) is a federal law that sets minimum standards for most voluntarily established retirement and health plans in private industry. The primary purpose of ERISA is to protect the individuals who participate in these plans. From the U.S. Circuit Courts to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), there was no shortage of cases involving Read More

A putative class of roughly 101,000 participants in multiple retirement plans for Koch employees, reached a $4 million settlement with Koch Industries Inc., Koch Business Solutions LP, and the Koch Benefits Administrative Committee (“Koch”), in July 2021.Almost six months later, in December 2021,  federal judge in Georgia approved a $1 million award of attorney’s fees to lawyers from the law firms of Nichols Kaster Read More

The Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA), part of the Department of Labor (“DOL”), is an agency that enforces Title I of ERISA. At the end of 2021, EBSA released a fact sheet summarizing its fiscal year (FY) 2021 enforcement statistics. In 2021, EBSA restored Over $2.4 billion to employee benefit plans, participants, and beneficiaries. The total monetary recoveries included $499.5 million in benefits Read More

The Required Amendments List (the “List” or “RAL”) is an annual list of changes in retirement plan qualification requirements (see Revenue Procedure 2016-37). It also establishes amendment deadlines for individually designed plans. Generally, the Required Amendments List will include an item after the issuance of any guidance for the item, including any model amendment. However, the IRS has the discretion to Read More

The IRS recently issued proposed rules that would make permanent and automatic the 30-day extension for furnishing reporting forms for the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) to individuals. The IRS has also stated that the proposed relief is available for 2021 reporting. This should provide some relief for those Applicable Large Employers (“ALEs”) and health plan providers nervously preparing for the looming January 31, Read More

When a retirement plan participant files a lawsuit to recover damages from harm due to the plan sponsor’s alleged breach of fiduciary duty, employers and plan administrators must furnish certain plan documents on demand. While the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (“ERISA”) requires the production of relevant materials, employers and plan administrators are not required to undertake any extensive searches Read More

There are many emerging issues for fiduciaries of 401(k) and 403(b) plans. These issues include the Department of Labor’s (“DOL”) regulation of ERISA investment duties and ESG considerations, as well as its recently re-proposed rule regarding the same. Compared to the prior rule enacted by the Trump administration at the end of 2020, the latest proposal represents a significant shift in the DOL’s attitude towards ESG Read More