Business Owners and Plan Sponsors: You need to be more engaged in your Plan (its the law)

Business Owners and Plan Sponsors: You need to be more engaged in your Plan (its the law)

Business owners and plan sponsors:  When it comes to the 401(k) retirement plan that you’ve established for your company, you need to know one thing: You (the fiduciary or plan sponsor) are working for the employees and their beneficiaries. Your main focus is them, not the company. Therefore, you want to make sure that you are paying reasonable costs for the plan, [and] you need to make sure the investment selection has a wide variety of investments. All the liability is on the fiduciary of the defined contribution plan, in the eyes of the Department of Labor.  This is evident in the surge of fee litigation since 2007, cases which have included some of the largest Fortune 500 companies.  The Department of Labor does not care what the performance of that large cap growth fund was, or if Bill Gross left PIMCO on Friday. What they care about is your process in analyzing fees, your investments overall.   If you can demonstrate process, you are 80% of the way there.

The above quotes were excerpts from a presentation by Trent Grinkmeyer, a financial consultant with Grinkmeyer and Leonard Wealth Management. at this year’s Employee Benefit News’ Benefits Forum and Expo.  The full article in which these quotes appeared was written by Michael Giardina, was titled Why retirement plan fiduciaries need to be more engaged, can be found on the Employee Benefit News website.