We have spent a lot of time on the podcast talking about how to make your retirement plan stronger and healthier. Today, we turn the conversation on its head and discuss strategies to make your retirement plan unattractive, to plaintiff’s attorneys and the ERISA lawsuits. With me I have two previous podcast guests, we have our legal eagle Tom Clark, ERISA Attorney with Wagner Law Group and our voice of the retirement industry Josh Dietch. There is laughter, witty banter and even some great suggestions you can take away and bring to your next retirement committee meeting.
Before we get started, we will soon announce our next live webinar to our email subscribers coming up in May. Thank you again to everyone who voted! I am happy share that our next topic will be, drum roll, “Should Your Employees Consider Your HSA Plan as a Retirement Plan?”. Again, stay tuned for the email soon to come email announcement. As a reminder, if you are not an email subscriber, you are missing out on valuable podcast updates, opportunities to submit ideas for topics to explore, questions to future guests, timely white papers and invitations to our webinars and other live events. If you are not part of our growing community, go to www.401kfridays.com/subscribe today and you can get that taken care of.
Guest Bios
Tom Clark is Of Counsel with The Wagner Law Group, a law firm specializing in ERISA & Employee Benefits, Estate Planning, and Employment, Labor & Human Resources Law. His expertise encompasses all aspects of employee benefits programs, including the design, implementation and compliance of retirement plans, health and welfare plans, and executive and incentive compensation arrangements. He also has a robust practice assisting industry service providers in meeting their ERISA compliance and general business needs. Tom is also a well-seasoned ERISA litigator. Earlier in his career, he worked for the law firm of Schlichter, Bogard & Denton including on such landmark cases as Tibble v. Edison, which was heard this year by the U.S. Supreme Court. Tom is Editor-in-Chief of the Fiduciary Matters Blog, a blog visited over 150,000 times since its first publication in March 2013. He also teaches ERISA Fiduciary Law as an Adjunct Professor at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, his alma mater.
Josh Dietch joined Chatham Partners in 2005 and is a Managing Director. In this capacity, Joshua manages research and consulting engagements that focus on client retention and new business development processes. Prior to joining Chatham, Joshua was Director, Product Marketing and Management with ADP Retirement Services managing product development and marketing for ADP's defined contribution and executive deferred compensation products. Earlier in his career, Joshua was a consultant with Cerulli Associates, helping financial service firms with both business strategy and new product development, and previously worked for a subsidiary of the Principal Financial Group. He has been quoted on financial issues for leading publications such as the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Pensions and Investments, Investment News and several trade publications, and has also appeared on CNBC. Joshua received his B.A. in History from Bates College.
401(k) Fridays Podcast Overview
Struggling with a fiduciary issue, looking for strategies to improve employee retirement outcomes or curious about the impact of current events on your retirement plan? We've had conversations with retirement industry leaders to address these and other relevant topics! You can easily explore over fifty prior on-demand audio interviews here. Don't forget to subscribe as we release a new episode each Friday!
Get beyond the eyeball grabbing headlines, the ever present three bullet summaries and hear some well thought out perspectives to help guide conversations and decisions in your workplace retirement plans. Our guest today, Brian Reid, the Chief Economist at the Investment Company Institute or ICI, shares that goal and provides some great food for thought for you. He addresses some recent stories you might have come across such as “Are 401(k) Plans A Failed Experiment”, and were “Employees Better off Under Pension Plans”. He also provides some context on the other side of the conversation we had a few episodes ago about State Run Retirement Plans. As I said in that episode, not everyone is convinced that they are ready for prime time. Now, you may or may not agree with all of his points, but what I really appreciated is that Brian is armed with research, facts and he does a great job keeping the conversation engaging and thought provoking!
Guest Bio
Brian K. Reid is chief economist at the Investment Company Institute (ICI). Reid oversees the Institute’s statistical collections and its research on the US and global funds, financial markets, US retirement market, and investor demographics. His research and analysis focuses on financial institutions and markets, investor trends, and the impact of regulation on funds, their investors, and the markets. Before joining the Institute, Reid worked as a staff economist in the Monetary Affairs Division at the Federal Reserve Board. Reid graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with honors and holds a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.
401(k) Fridays Podcast Overview
Struggling with a fiduciary issue, looking for strategies to improve employee retirement outcomes or curious about the impact of current events on your retirement plan? We've had conversations with retirement industry leaders to address these and other relevant topics! You can easily explore over fifty prior on-demand audio interviews here. Don't forget to subscribe as we release a new episode each Friday!
With all of the 401(k) and ERISA lawsuits floating around these days, we have gotten a fair number of questions from employers about fiduciary liability insurance. We have also made reference on several prior episodes that it is critical to ensure you have a well crafted fiduciary liability insurance. As they say, never bring a knife to a gun fight, so I reached out to the biggest gun I know, Dana Kopper, a Managing Director and an Professional Liability Insurance specialist with Lockton Insurance Brokers. After nearly forty years in the business, handling thousands of claims, being integrally involved in countless settlements, Dana shares some of his insights on how fiduciary risk management, insurance and indemnification all work hand in hand to protect both employers and their retirement plan fiduciaries. He also dispels a few myths, shares some stories and offers a few thoughts on what not do when it comes to fiduciary liability insurance.
Don’t forget, for each podcast episode we have a dedicated website page with guest bios, photos, episode descriptions, helpful links and even a built in podcast player! For this episode, we even have a recent white paper with more information on fiduciary liability insurance. Check it out at 401kfridays.com/kopper
Guest Bio
Dana Kopper is a Managing Director with Lockton Companies, LLC, Directors & Officers and Governance Risk Management Group. Lockton is the world’s largest privately-held risk and insurance management services firm with 4,450 employees operating out of offices in 39 countries.
Dana has provided a broad range of governance and risk management consulting and transactional services to public, private, for-profit, and not-for-profit organizations for the past 38 years.
He is one of the country’s leading D&O and professional liability brokers – a noted expert (court qualified expert witness) in the areas of international directors’ and officers’ legal liability, investment management professional liability, governance infrastructure design, board effectiveness, director accountability, organizational compliance efficacy, and associated risk mitigation strategies. Dana was recently selected as the AIG 2012 Broker of the Year.
Dana has lived and worked throughout the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. He is actively involved with international directors’ and officers’ liability and corporate governance including recent emphasis on U.S. exchange listed Chinese firms in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and other cities.
Prior to his career in risk and insurance management, Dana was a federal agent with the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) – criminal investigations, counterintelligence and counterterrorism.
401(k) Fridays Podcast Overview
Struggling with a fiduciary issue, looking for strategies to improve employee retirement outcomes or curious about the impact of current events on your retirement plan? We've had conversations with retirement industry leaders to address these and other relevant topics! You can easily explore over fifty prior on-demand audio interviews here. Don't forget to subscribe as we release a new episode each Friday!
This is our second episode where we tackle the ins and outs of retirement plan discrimination and compliance testing. The first episode we released a few weeks ago hit on some of the core concepts around discrimination testing and laid five strategies to improve your results. Today, we pick up where we left off with the last episode and address some more complex concepts around discrimination testing. Thankfully, I have Chad Johnson, a fellow admitted 401(k) nerd, and Third Party Administrator with Plan Design Consultants to help us out. Over the years I have had numerous conversations with retirement service providers of all shapes and sizes on M&A, Control Groups, Grace Periods and Discrimination testing. In my humble opinion, I think Chad provided one of the better explanations of all this that I have heard!
Let me know if you agree, disagree or if we missed something you have questions about, shoot us an email at info@401kfridays.com.
Guest Bio
Chad Johansen is a self-proclaimed retirement-plan-aholoic. As a frequent speaker at the 401(k) Academy, Retireholi(k)s and other national venues, Chad is passionate about helping advisors and plan sponsors understand the intricacies of the 401(k) market place. Chad takes great pride in translating complicated retirement into 401(k) EasySpeak with the goal of creating educated and confident decisions.
Chad joined Plan Design Consultants, Inc. in March 2010. As an Internal Retirement Plan Consultant, Chad was assigned to advisor support throughout Northern California. Chad was also responsible for producing the PDC comprehensive retirement plan comparative analysis and aided in vendor research, product knowledge and PDC marketing efforts. In January 2011, Chad made the transition as our External Retirement Plan Consultant covering the California territory. In 2014 Chad joined in ownership of the firm and was promoted to Sales Director now acting as a player/coach to the PDC Sales Team.
Chad also sits on the Board of Directors for The Kyle MacFarlane Foundation. In partnership with legendary bike builder Arlen Ness, Stanford Medical and Victory Motorcycles the foundation is teaming up to build a “Hands on Nutrition” motorcycle to raise awareness to the many stomach conditions plaguing Americans.
Chad earned his Bachelors of Science Degree in Business Administration from William Woods University in Fulton, Missouri. While attending WWU on a baseball scholarship Chad excelled in both business and finance. He was honored as Business Student of the Year and graduated summa cum laude.
Chad and his wife Brooke live in San Jose, California and recently welcomed their second child. They enjoy being outdoors, golfing and skiing/snowboarding.
401(k) Fridays Podcast Overview
Struggling with a fiduciary issue, looking for strategies to improve employee retirement outcomes or curious about the impact of current events on your retirement plan? We've had conversations with retirement industry leaders to address these and other relevant topics! You can easily explore over fifty prior on-demand audio interviews here. Don't forget to subscribe as we release a new episode each Friday!
In prior episodes we have talked about how to "Transition from Financial Education to Financial Wellness", how "Financial Wellness is a Trend too Big to be Ignored" and we have even talked with Cisco Systems to learn how they designed and rolled out their financial wellness strategy. What we haven’t spent any time on is making sure that as you introduce or expand your financial or general wellness programs, you don’t run into compliance problems along the way! So, I was excited to have Monica Novak, an ERISA Attorney with Drinker Biddle & Reath join me on the podcast. Monica does a terrific job sharing her experience working with employers on questions and concerns on both financial wellness and more traditional physical wellness programs. As much of our conversation does focus on what can go wrong with wellness programs, I did want to share that Monica is a big fan of wellness and didn’t want some of the doom and gloom we chat about to scare anyone away from pursuing workplace wellness!
Guest Bio
Monica A. Novak assists clients with a range of employee benefits matters, including health and welfare benefits, tax-qualified retirement plans and nonqualified plans. She routinely counsels clients on implementing employee wellness programs that comply with the various nondiscrimination regulations applicable to wellness programs – HIPAA, ADA, and GINA. In addition she helps counsels clients regarding the design, implementation and administration of benefit plans to ensure consistency with plan terms and compliance with the Internal Revenue Code and ERISA requirements, as well as the requirements under Health Care Reform.
Monica has spent the last eight years with Drinker, Biddle & Reath and prior to that graduated from Harvard Law School.
401(k) Fridays Podcast Overview
Struggling with a fiduciary issue, looking for strategies to improve employee retirement outcomes or curious about the impact of current events on your retirement plan? We've had conversations with retirement industry leaders to address these and other relevant topics! You can easily explore over fifty prior on-demand audio interviews here. Don't forget to subscribe as we release a new episode each Friday!