Welcome to the second installment of our new series for pharmacy owners on 401k fiduciary resposibility. The first installment gave you a brief overview on what it means to be a fiduciary for a pharmacy 401k plan. This installment will focus on the duty you have to your employees in helping them use your plan to successfully save for retirement. So, let's get started.
The duty of exclusive purpose means that the plan should be designed to provide benefits exclusively to the plan participants. This means that you have to always act with the plan participants interest above all others associated with the plan. This sounds reasonable but there are specific things that you must do to satisfy this duty.
- Defray reasonable expenses of administering the plan - this has been a really hot button issue in the past several years and new regulations have been issued to help force plan service providers to disclose all fees to plan sponsors (including any revenue sharing arrangements). If you do not know what your fees are, then how can you evaluate the service you get from each service provider. If you haven't seen a complete list of fees from your plan service providers, then we suggest you talk with them ASAP. If they will not provide them to you, we suggest you find other plan service providers.
- Delivering successful outcomes for participants specifically - each one of the employees should be educated on how to use the plan specifically for their retirement objectives. We recommend that you have at least one meeting per year where you allow the employees to meet with the advisor one-on-one to discuss using the plan specifically for retirement. We feel that this should be part of any advisor's service plan and your advisor should agree to have this meeting.
- Helping participants accumulate the greatest amount of assets at the lowest possible cost - we consider this to be the most imporant of all your fiduciary responsibilities. We have already addressed the cost and fees above so we won't mention it again here. We do think it is important to know that helping participants accumulate the greatest amount of assets is dependent on three main things; the education level of the participant, the investments chosen and the expenses of the plan.
- Keeping participants informed so they can make informed decisions - we have already discussed the education needed in the plan so we will only mention here that you should have two employee meetings per year; the one-on-one meetings mentioned above and a general employee meeting to allow all employees the ability to ask questions and understand the basics of the plan.
Being a fiduciary is a big responsibility because you have the success of many people dependent on your decisions. If you keep the above four things in mind when making decisions about your plan, then you will satisfy a big part of that responsibility.