Business owners focus attention on fixing business problems and hire an advisor to fix financial one’s. And if you’re like everyone else in the business arena, you probably lose sleep over any number of these potential problems.
Don’t let your 401(k) be among them.
As either an employer sponsoring a 401(k) plan or a financial advisor helping a business-owning client navigate the retirement benefit, there are many responsibilities.
You must:
- Choose proper investment options
- Understand distribution regulations
- File the right reports to the right government agencies
Unless you’ve worked in the financial world for a long time, it might escape you how utterly overwhelming these duties can be for a plan sponsor. It might also escape you how wrong things can go when you don’t know what you’re doing. Think government review and lawsuits.
And let’s face it, just those three responsibilities have the potential to use up vast amounts of valuable time, not to mention, as we said, keeping you from focusing on your business. That’s true whether you’re the business owner offering a 401(k) or the financial advisor assisting.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, it’s not supposed to be that way, which is why ERISA rule 401a1B exists. It states plan sponsors are required to hire “prudent experts” to assist in areas where they lack the competency to fulfill their fiduciary duties.
FiduciaryShield is that “prudent expert.”
When you hire FiduciaryShield as your full-service outsourced Administrative Fiduciary, you get the peace of mind that comes with knowing things will be done right, that you will meet all your obligations. Boiled down to its essentials, you get to hand off the necessary but tedious work that every 401(k) requires.
And it’s cheaper in so many ways to bring everything under one umbrella. That’s when you’re leveraging our experience and expertise while keeping your costs under control.
When you work with FiduciarySheild, you get unparalleled support, including these particularly important services that take a load off your mind and free you to build your business or advisory practice:
1. Plan Documentation
The retirement plan experts at FiduciaryShield will review and interpret your current plan documents and let you know if there are any irregularities. We will help you administer your loan policy and maintain your plan documents in accordance with Department of Labor (DOL) and IRS requirements.
FiduciaryShield also reviews your Fidelity bond to ensure it meets ERISA requirements and will help you maintain the proper Fiduciary insurance.
2. Distribution Requirements
Plan sponsors are ultimately responsible for properly processing 401(k) distributions. But when you work with FiduciaryShield, we take care of this responsibility, including:
- In-service or hardship withdrawals
- Loan requests
- Distributions due to separation from service
- Qualified domestic relations orders (QDRO)
- Required minimum distributions (RMD)
- Corrective refunds
We review all requests before you sign off on them, helping to ensure you remain in compliance.
3. Participant Management Services
FiduciaryShield helps you keep track of employee eligibility and vesting schedules. We will monitor loan defaults, review deferral suspensions due to hardship withdrawals, and help you find terminated participants when necessary.
4. Notice and Disclosure Requirements
When you work with FiduciaryShield, we take care of the multiple disclosure requirements plan sponsors are tasked with maintaining, including:
- 404(a)5 annual notifications
- Safe harbor notices
- Annual Qualified Default Investment Alternative (QDIA) notices
- Summary of material modifications
- Summary of annual reports
We also keep keeps track of your deadlines to ensure the proper notices reach your employees in a timely manner.
5. Government Reporting Assistance
Properly submitting your government reports is a critical part of 401(k) plan administration. We help make this easy by preparing your IRS forms 5500 and 8955-SSA.
We also reconcile your plan at year-end to verify you’ve met your annual employer contribution requirements and run profit sharing calculations to ensure they are correct.
Experience the Difference of Working with an Outsourced Administrative Fiduciary
Having FiduciaryShield on your team takes the 401(k) admin monkey off your back. Instead of always wondering if you forgot something and losing sleep over it, you can rest easy and be confident in our experience and expertise. Imagine the freedom of worry-free 401(k) administration that liberates you from the work and worry of doing it solo.
Contact us today to learn how we can help you offer The Better 401(k).