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On January 12, 2021, the Employee Benefits Security Administration (“EBSA”) of the Department of Labor (“DOL”) announced new guidance on a range of issues related to missing participants:

  • In Missing Participants – Best Practices for Pension Plans, EBSA has provided examples of best practices that it has identified as being effective at minimizing and mitigating the problem of missing or nonresponsive participants.
  • This new guidance also includes Compliance Assistance Release No. 2021-01, which provides a roadmap of investigative processes and case-closing practices of EBSA investigators who conduct Terminated Vested Participants Project (“TVPP”) audits of defined benefit pension plans. One purpose of these audits is to assess whether defined benefit plans have taken appropriate steps to locate missing participants and beneficiaries.
  • EBSA also issued Field Assistance Bulletin No. 2021-01, which announced the DOL’s temporary enforcement policy on a terminated defined contribution plans’ use of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’s expanded missing participants program.

This article focuses on the guidance for ongoing plans (and not Field Assistance Bulletin 2021-01 for terminated plans).

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Continue Reading Five New Ways That Plan Fiduciaries May Locate Missing Participants

On September 11, 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”) issued revised regulations to clarify certain rights and employer responsibilities under the paid sick leave and expanded family and medical leave provisions of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (“FFCRA”).  The revisions were made in response to a recent decision of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (“SDNY”), which invalidated certain provisions of the FFCRA regulations.

The FFCRA, which we discussed here, requires employers with fewer than 500 employees to provide emergency paid sick leave (“EPSL”) and emergency Family and Medical Leave Act leave (“EFMLA”) to employees who meet certain COVID-19-related conditions.  DOL issued regulations implementing the FFCRA on April 1, 2020.

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Continue Reading DOL Revises FFCRA Regulations in Response to Federal Court Decision Invalidating Parts of the FFCRA

A New York federal district court judge has struck down significant portions of the U.S. Department of Labor’s (“DOL”) joint employer rule, which went into effect earlier this year.  As a result of this ruling, certain companies may be more likely to be deemed joint employers and exposed to liability for wage and hour violations under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”).

As we described here, in March 2020, a final rule issued by DOL went into effect implementing a four-factor test for determining whether more than one entity may be considered an individual’s employer under the FLSA.  The new test shifted the existing rule’s focus on the “economic realities” of the alleged employer/employee relationship to a narrower inquiry regarding whether the alleged employer actually exercised control over the alleged employment relationship.

The District Court for the Southern District of New York has now held that DOL’s final joint employer rule violated the Administrative Procedures Act for two reasons.  First, the court found that the rule contradicted the text of the FLSA because it ignored relevant concepts defined in the statute, such as the definitions of “employ” and “employee,” and that DOL had erroneously applied different standards for “primary” and “joint” employment when no such distinction exists in the FLSA itself.  Second, the court found that DOL’s reasoning for the rule change was arbitrary, capricious, and not supported by adequate evidence.

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Continue Reading Federal District Court Strikes Down DOL Joint Employer Rule

On August 18, 2020, the Department of Labor (“DOL”) announced new guidance on lifetime income disclosures that must be included in pension benefit statements furnished to participants in defined contribution plans, such as 401(k) and 403(b) plans.  This guidance, issued in the form of an interim final rule, sets forth the rules that plan administrators must follow in implementing the lifetime income disclosure requirement that was added to ERISA by Section 203 of the 2019 SECURE Act.

  • The disclosures required by the interim final rule must be provided starting one year after publication of the interim final rule in the Federal Register. (As of publication of this post, the rule has yet to be published in the Federal Register.)
  • As used in the interim final rule (and this blog post), the term participant includes an beneficiary with a plan account, such as an alternate payee or the beneficiary of a deceased participant.

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Continue Reading New SECURE Act Guidance: Lifetime Income Disclosures for 401(k) and 403(b) Plans

On May 27, 2020, the Department of Labor (“DOL” or “Department”) published a final rule providing an alternative safe harbor for furnishing ERISA pension plan disclosures electronically on a website or via email.  We previously blogged about the proposed rule here.  This post provides an overview of the final rule and highlights some key changes from the proposed rule.

As we previously noted, electronic disclosure has been permitted since 2002 under a safe harbor that allows plan administrators to electronically disclose ERISA documents to individuals who are “wired at work” or individuals who have affirmatively consented to electronic delivery.  This new safe harbor is an alternative to the 2002 safe harbor.  Plan administrators of pension plans may rely on either the new safe harbor, the 2002 safe harbor, both, or neither.  Significantly, however, the new safe harbor is limited to pension plans.  The 2002 safe harbor remains available for welfare plans.

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Continue Reading Electronic Disclosure Rule for Pension Plans Finalized

The U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”) has published a final rule, which takes effect on March 16, 2020, outlining the new four-factor approach DOL will use to determine whether, under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”), a business is a “joint employer” of another company’s employees and thus jointly and severally liable for wage and hour obligations.  The new rule comes as good news for employers because it establishes a concrete and narrow standard for determining joint employer status and is expected to provide clearer guidance to federal courts making joint employer determinations.

The final rule represents the first time in 60 years that DOL has issued a joint employer rule, although over the decades it has issued guidance both expanding and contracting the scope of the definition and potential liability.  Furthermore, the rule is consistent with a series of actions that DOL, under the Trump administration, has taken to rescind the previously broader definition of “joint employer” under the Obama administration (including its June 7, 2017 withdrawal of employee-friendly Administrator’s Interpretation guidance documents from 2015 and 2016).

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Continue Reading DOL Issues Final “Joint Employer” Rule

In October, the U.S. Department of Labor released a proposed rule that would increase plan administrators’ ability to make certain required ERISA pension disclosures through electronic, rather than paper, delivery.  Below is a summary of the proposed rule with some highlights on aspects of the proposal that have been questioned by interested parties and might be changed.
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Continue Reading DOL Proposal for Electronic Disclosure of ERISA Pension Documents

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has announced a final rule that will increase access to overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) for approximately 1.3 million workers.  The final rule, which comes six months after DOL published a proposed rule in March, is the latest development in a years-long process by DOL, spanning the Obama Administration and the Trump Administration, to modify FLSA overtime regulations.  The new rule takes effect on January 1, 2020, giving employers just a narrow window to assess the rule’s impact on their operations.  The final rule is available here.  DOL has also published a fact sheet that provides an overview of the final rule, available here.
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Continue Reading DOL Publishes Final Rule Expanding Overtime Protections

On Wednesday, April 18th, the SEC introduced a much-anticipated package of proposed rules and formal guidance concerning the standards of conduct for financial professionals. The more than 1,000-page proposal, which emerged eight years after Congress required the agency to conduct a study on the topic, addresses whether investment advisers and broker-dealers should have identical or…

Our colleague Jason Levy recently published an article in The Actuary Magazine on the Department of Labor’s fiduciary conflict rule.  More than six years in the making, this rule represents perhaps the most significant regulation from the DOL during the Obama Administration.

The fiduciary conflict rule expands the definition of fiduciary to cover, with certain exceptions, all investment advice provided to a retirement plan (like a 401(k) plan, defined benefit pension plan, or an IRA), or to a participant or beneficiary in any of those retirement plans.  The rule imposes fiduciary status on a broad category of professionals, including many broker-dealers who previously had taken the position that they were not investment advice fiduciaries based on a DOL regulation that had been in place since 1975.

In contrast to the sweeping changes it imposes on investment advice professionals, the fiduciary conflict rule will have a far more modest effect on employers.  The rule is not intended to confer fiduciary status on sponsors of retirement plans.  Likewise, there had been concern under the proposed version of the rule that human resources and other employees who interact with participants might be considered fiduciaries when they discuss retirement plan investments with their co-workers.  However, the final version of the rule provides that, absent unusual circumstances, such employees would not be covered.

Nevertheless, the fiduciary conflict rule has important implications for employers that sponsor retirement plans.

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Continue Reading What Employers Need to Know About the Fiduciary Conflict Rule