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Employee Benefits

Fiduciary Compliance & Best Practices

Fiduciaries serve a vital role with regard to ERISA-governed employee benefit plans, providing administration, oversight of plan investments, selection of service providers, and handling benefit appeals, among other things.  The Employee Benefits Group routinely helps fiduciaries identify and adopt “best practices” from within the employee benefits community.  While plan fiduciaries seek to perform at the highest standards, at a minimum they must keep their employee benefit plans in compliance with legal requirements imposed by ERISA, Department of Labor regulations, the Internal Revenue Code, Treasury Regulations, and the ever-growing body of regulatory and judicial interpretations of the law.  The Employee Benefits Group can help you focus on putting into place the procedural safeguards, organizational structures, and critical analytical processes that will help ensure compliance.  Toward that end, our attorneys act as legal counsel to numerous 401(k) and pension administrative and investment committees.  With our focus on process-driven due diligence, we help our clients avoid the missteps that can result in fiduciary liability.  The age-old axiom holds true in the area of employee benefit plan compliance:  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  In the event you are facing an audit, you can rely on our extensive experience in dealing with the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Labor, as well as other regulatory and administrative bodies.

Experience

Advised manufacturing client on fiduciary duty implications and best practices of allocating expenses among multiple qualified retirement plans
Advised on large multistate welfare plan’s contracts for administering and/or insuring medical, prescription drug, life, long-term disability, short-term disability, flexible spending accounts, and employee assistance program
Assisted with termination, assignment and transition of employee benefits programs in stock sale of information technology-based subsidiary of public company, including assigning certain plans to parent and transitioning other programs to buyer.
Established fiduciary compliance program for qualified retirement plans with 9,000 participants/$600 million in assets; drafted documents on committee members, authority, responsibility and rules and policies for paying expenses from plan assets
Negotiated complex administrative service and outsourcing agreement for group of large related 401(k) plans