As required by the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022, the three primary agencies charged with overseeing retirement plans have issued a joint request for information (RFI) to help improve the effectiveness of existing reporting and disclosure requirements.
The RFI comes via the Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration, the Department of Treasury, and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation as part of a federal government review.
“The Employee Benefits Security Administration is focused on empowering America’s workers and families by making it easier to understand their workplace benefits. This Request for Information is an important step to explore how the content, design and delivery of disclosures required for retirement plans may be reimagined, improved, consolidated, standardized and simplified to enhance participants’ understanding of their rights and benefits, promote greater participant engagement and improve outcomes for people across the country,” Lisa Gomez, Assistant Secretary for Employee Benefits Security, said in a statement.
Specifically, the RFI addresses Section 319 of SECURE 2.0, requiring that these agencies review the existing reporting and disclosure requirements for certain retirement plans under ERISA and the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) that are applicable to each agency.
Following this review, the agencies are to report to Congress, no later than three years after enactment (or Dec. 29, 2025), concerning the effectiveness of the reporting and disclosure requirements.
Congress directed that the report should include recommendations on “consolidating, simplifying, standardizing, and improving such requirements with the dual goals of reducing compliance burdens and ensuring plan participants’ and beneficiaries’ timely receipt and better understanding of the information they need to monitor their plans, prepare for retirement, and get the benefits they have earned.”
The report will also consider how participants and beneficiaries are providing preferred contact information, the methods by which plan sponsors and plans are furnishing disclosures, and the rate at which participants and beneficiaries are receiving, accessing, understanding, and retaining disclosures.
The RFI, which will be posted on each agency’s website and published in the Federal Register, includes 24 questions on a broad range of topics relevant to effective reporting and disclosure. These include:
- the number and frequency of disclosures received by workers;
- information disclosed and its effectiveness, accessibility and understandability, including to non-English speakers;
- how plans obtain and update contact information for workers; and
- plans’ experiences completing and filing reports and obtaining assistance from the agencies.
The RFI includes a 90-day period for public comments and instructions on how to submit them.
Last August, the DOL issued a similar RFI regarding retirement plan reporting and disclosure requirements, but that request addressed different sections of SECURE 2.0.
