Employer Strategies

We’re starting your week with three important facts, developments or conversations from recent and upcoming events. This week, we look at the new IRS guidelines, final ruling from CMS on MLR ratio and what’s going on in Europe with retirement taxes.

Get ready for tip off. Sun Life Financial is set to offer brokers a new place to take employer clients and employees — the NBA basketball court.

Opponents of a European Union financial-transactions tax say pension funds will be hurt even if their home governments don’t sign up.

“Make an Impact,” the theme for the 2013 NAPA/ASPPA 401(k) summit that began yesterday in Las Vegas, may have sounded more like an exhortation to the nearly 1,400 pension professionals attending the event -- but an appeal that many appear to have every intention of acting upon. Threats to the 401(k) from Washington were chronicled in the opening session by ASPPA CEO Brian Graff and others.

Odds are strong that many of your clients’ 401(k) plans could have significantly greater assets even without spectacular investment performance or a dramatic increase in salary deferral rates.

ERISA plans, as financial entities, will be required to clear certain over-the-counter swaps (i.e., not executed on an exchange) at a “derivatives clearing organization.”

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act requires that swap transactions go through a clearing process. On February 7, 2013, the DOL issued Advisory Opinion 2013-01A that provides clarification.

2013 is seen as a year of growth in voluntary long-term care, LTC, Prudential, Unum.

Overcoming employee inertia in retirement savings with effective plan design by Unified Trust’s Lee Topley.

How agents can help highly compensated executives save and remain competitive with safe harbor 401(k) by John Ludwig