On June 26, the Council provided a detailed response to an RFI from Senate HELP Committee Ranking Member Bill Cassidy, including a five-part plan to enhance gig worker retirement security for independent workers:
On June 20, 2024, the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released Notice 2024-55, providing guidance on the SECURE 2.0 provisions creating: (a) emergency personal expense distributions and (b) domestic abuse victim distributions.
The Internal Revenue Service on June 17, 2024, issued a series of frequently asked questions (FAQs) about Code section 127 educational assistance programs (EAPs).
The American Benefits Council and 10 other organizations will host the ERISA 50th Anniversary Symposium and Gala on Thursday, September 12, 2024, in Washington, D.C.
"I write on behalf of the American Benefits Council (\"the Council\"), in connection with the solicitation of recommendations for the U.S. Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 2024-2025 priority guidance plan (Notice 2024-28), to strongly urge that Treasury and the IRS take action to provide employers with the certainty and the path forward needed to enable them to access substantial welfare benefit fund assets – oftentimes hundreds of millions of dollars or more – to provide health and welfare benefits to employees and their beneficiaries."
As a part of ongoing efforts to push back on harmful and ill-founded litigation against employee benefit plans, the American Benefits Council is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review an appellate court decision with sweeping implications for 401(k) retirement plan sponsors. If the decision is allowed to stand, it will be much more difficult for plan sponsors to fend off class action fee cases.
On April 16, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) published in the Federal Register a notice announcing its intention to collect information voluntarily from retirement plans in order to establish the Retirement Savings Lost and Found created by Section 303 of the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 ("SECURE 2.0"). This voluntary reporting could first be provided through an attachment to the 2023 Form 5500. Thus, DOL's proposal envisions voluntary reporting on plan years that have already finished. As discussed below, the proposal also envisions voluntary reporting on plan years from the first date that the plan was subject to ERISA – long before the plans years that are expressly contemplated by the information collection provisions of SECURE 2.0.
WASHINGTON, DC – In written statement sent to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions, the American Benefits Council underscored the importance of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) and its federal preemption standard, which provides the path to higher quality, lower cost care for millions of American workers and their families across the country."
The Council's comments on the U.S. Department of Labor's proposed regulations that would implement the new statutory prohibited transaction exemption under Section 4975 of the Internal Revenue Code
The filing of several class-action lawsuits in federal court appears to signal a new avenue for the plaintiffs' bar to allege fiduciary wrongdoing on the part of employee benefit plans, now related to the selection of an insurer for the purposes of executing a pension risk transfer.
