With so many things in life, careful planning and preparedness are probably the most important factors in advancing your chances of future success. On a personal level, maybe this means evaluating your past, current and future income and expenses in order to create a realistic but strict family budget. On a professional level, maybe this means examining your current career path and implementing a “five year plan” intended to achieve a higher level of education that would enable you to attain a larger income in a more desirable profession.

Did you know that a plan sponsor acting in its role as plan administrator has a duty to ensure that any rollover into its qualified retirement plan is qualified? Many do not. If you are a plan sponsor of a tax-qualified retirement plan, what steps do you take in order to ensure that the rollover received by your plan is qualified? Sad to say, due to the ignorance associated with the general requirement, many plan sponsors do not follow any process to attempt to reasonably ensure that a rollover it accepts is from a qualified source and in a qualified amount. As a result, many plans could unknowingly have tax-qualification issues as a result of a failure to engage in a diligent “rollover in” review process. If you are one of the many plan sponsors who do not adequately review the qualification of rollovers into your qualified plan; this article will help you to understand the issue, the process that you should already be engaged in when it comes to reviewing such contributions and certain new Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) guidance on the matter.

It is that time of year again, when most retirement plan sponsors and service providers must prepare annual participant notifications such as Safe Harbor notices and start looking forward towards other plan operational issues in relation to the next plan year. In the wake of the government shutdown, retirement service providers have been anxiously the newly published Cost of Living Adjustments (“COLA”) for the upcoming 2014 calendar year, as that announcement bears directly on information that is included in many of the various required notices that must be distributed by December 1st. Normally the annual COLA announcement occurs by mid-October, so with a two week delay plan sponsors must act quickly to update their participants about the upcoming plan year. The newly released 2014 COLA limits are one of several items included within our Year End Checklist. We hope that the checklist will assist you as you attempt to navigate your way through the many time sensitive tasks facing your retirement plan over the upcoming months.