Pension Protection Act Blog

At the Cincinnati Benefits Conference last week, I was surrounded by some of the giants of plan document design, especially pre-approved prototypes and volume submitter documents. At one point, around one table during lunch, sat the writers of prototypes and volume submitter documents used by more than 70% of 401(k) plans, profit sharing plans, […]

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On Friday, Ohio announced that its five public employee pension systems will adopt policies aimed at dropping investments in companies which do business in Iran and the Sudan. Recently, Illinois had adopted the same policy by state statute. That state statute was subsequently overturned by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District […]

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New information today from the IRS, PBGC and the Government Printing Office.
Today, the IRS released Revenue Procedure 2007-37, setting forth the procedure that a sponsor of a defined benefit plan, other than a multiemployer plan, can request and obtain approval for the use of plan-specific mortality tables. This revenue procedure contains specific […]

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Last Friday, May 27th, President Bush signed into law the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans’ Care, Katrina Recovery, and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act, 2007 (Public Law 110-28). This Act was H.R. 2206, and will be remembered for increasing the minimum wage and providing for funding for the war in Iraq. The Act also contained […]

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The new immigration bill, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (S. 1348), raises another question. If alien, or undocumented, workers are recognized as employees for qualified plan purposes in plans which previously did not recognize them as eligible employees, what service will count for vesting purposes?
I think the answer is to this question […]

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An update to the previous post about patenting plan designs - on May 17th, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) introduced H.R. 2365, a bill to limit damages arising from infringing on a patent for tax planning methods. With a couple of tax method patents pending before the U.S. Patent & Trademark office, including at least […]

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I am the first to admit that immigration is not my area of expertise. I am a pension geek. The Sunday morning talk shows devoted a lot of talk this morning to this new immigration bill. What caught my attention was a mention that the new bill will impact Social Security. […]

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