Client Service January 28, 2021

15th Anniversary of RPAY: Bukaty Companies Financial Services

Since winning the 2019 PLANSPONSOR Retirement Plan Adviser Mega Team of the Year award, Bukaty Companies Financial Services was acquired by employee benefits giant OneDigital, greatly expanding the services it can now offer clients.

 

Reported by

Vince Morris

One major development last year that affected Bukaty Companies Financial Services, the 2019 PLANSPONSOR Retirement Plan Adviser Mega Team of the Year, based in Overland Park, Kansas, was the acquisition of its registered investment adviser (RIA), Resource Investment Advisors, by OneDigital in February. Through this acquisition, OneDigital also acquired Bukaty.

“We saw this as an opportunity for growth beyond our Kansas City and Denver markets,” says Vince Morris, founder of Bukaty and now president of OneDigital Retirement, as well as president of OneDigital Investment Advisors.  “Also, OneDigital—the largest employee benefits firm in the country, with more than 100 offices—offers its customers more of a holistic vision of health, wealth and retirement. We believe that being able to have a broader conversation with our clients is a better value proposition.”

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While many other retirement plan practices struggled last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Morris says his team found “there was a lot of demand for our financial wellness platform, so we added four advisers to our team to support that. That brings us up to a total of 18 team members. We experienced great organic growth throughout 2020, and we attribute that to our size and scale, and the ability of our people to deploy their services through the use of technology.”

Since receiving the PLANSPONSOR honor in 2019, Morris says the industry has “become more mature, with more RIAs focused in this area. The tool sets, skills and deliverables these RIAs offer clients are all becoming more refined. They are better able to take care of plan sponsor clients and upgrade retirement outcomes for participants. Technology is driving a lot of that refinement. However, I would not say that the industry has drastically changed.”

Morris says he is very optimistic about the future of the retirement planning industry. “Now, more than ever, people want advice, and they want it through their employer,” he says. “Our viewpoint is that the American family is grappling with two main issues: health care costs and saving for retirement. We are an organization that believes deeply in helping people manage through those two decision points.”

As to how his practice has fared throughout the ongoing pandemic, Morris says: “We are pretty fortunate to be in the service industry and to have an offering in the marketplace that allows us to work from home. We have continued to perform at our highest level and, really, have been largely unaffected by the pandemic. In fact, we saw our high performers continue to be high performers, and we also some people become high performers working from home. The hardship comes in being emotionally able to deal with the quarantine. This may be the new norm.”

As the pandemic emerged, Morris and his team made it a point to explain the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act to clients.

“Internally, we were also having major discussions on inequality and social justice,” Morris says. “We now have a diversity and inclusion [D&I] committee that looks into these issues and delivers actionable items. Last year, OneDigital also sponsored  a survey on women and pensions to figure out how to attract more women to the business. This is a very important area for us.”

As to what retirement plan advisers can do to improve defined contribution (DC) plans and retirement readiness, Morris says he is very encouraged by the “movement in the past decade to focus more on retirement outcomes and getting participants engaged.”

“We are so lucky that so many sponsors today embrace automatic enrollment, escalation and target-date funds [TDFs],” he continues. “Now sponsors are beginning to understand the value of really taking care of plan participants to and through retirement. This is something we have been able to position our company to handle well. We are well equipped to coach our participants through various life events, not just retirement.”

Compliance January 27, 2021

DOL Missing Participant Guidance Not a List of Requirements

Plan fiduciaries will have to decide which suggestions fit their situations, and there are a few questions left unanswered, sources say.

Reported by


Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL)’s Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) issued guidance to help retirement plan fiduciaries locate and distribute retirement benefits to missing or nonresponsive participants.

The guidance included three parts. A page titled “Missing Participants – Best Practices for Pension Plans” describes a range of best practices for fiduciaries of retirement plans to consider. Compliance Assistance Release 2021-01 reveals the information EBSA staff request from plan sponsors and the errors they look for during investigations under the Terminated Vested Participants Project for defined benefit (DB) plans. Field Assistance Bulletin 2021-01 authorizes plan fiduciaries of terminating defined contribution (DC) plans to use the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) missing participant program for missing or nonresponsive participants’ account balances.

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“We think this is a good first step,” says Aliya Robinson, senior vice president, retirement and compensation policy, at the ERISA Industry Committee (ERIC). “We had been working with the EBSA for several years, asking for guidance. We think this best practices list is informational—but we want to make sure it doesn’t become a requirements list, because not everything on that list works for every employer.”

In a blog post, lawyers at Morgan Lewis expressed a similar unease, saying “there is a concern that the DOL, or private litigants, may attempt to frame the DOL guidance as a baseline of expected practices.” This is a concern even though the DOL guidance recognizes that not everything in its best practices document is appropriate for every plan.

Other attorneys offer pointers for implementing the DOL guidance. A client alert from B. David Joffe, a partner at Bradley, and Caleb L. Barron, an associate at Bradley, says plan sponsors should have a policy for finding missing participants and update it with additional steps they will take per the DOL guidance.

The attorneys also point out that all efforts to locate participants should be documented. “With written evidence that a prudent process is in place and is being followed, a plan administrator should be able to demonstrate that participants are not missing due to any fiduciary shortcomings,” they write.

In another blog post, Kimberly S. Couch, a partner with Verrill Law, points out, “Although plan fiduciaries may delegate recordkeeping, participant communication and missing participant searches to third-party administrators [TPAs], plan fiduciaries must ensure that the delegate has established and is following sound procedures. Plan fiduciaries are ultimately responsible for ensuring benefits are paid accurately and timely under the retirement plan.”

While the DOL guidance was comprehensive, the attorneys at Morgan Lewis say it still leaves unanswered questions and creates some new ones. “For example, the DOL guidance does not materially address how plans should handle participants that are the least likely to be locatable and/or still due a benefit, such as participants that are very old, long missing, long deceased or have material data gaps (such as incorrect Social Security numbers),” they write. “Another issue unaddressed by the guidance is how plans should address issues such as identity theft or plan resource limits, which may hinder search and outreach efforts. Finally, there is no acknowledgement in the DOL guidance of the challenges of participant inaction (such as participants that are not missing but voluntarily do not commence benefits or do not cash checks).”

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