4 Problems at the Intersection of Finance and HR

They are two of the most visible departments in corporations even though neither directly produces revenue, but does require expenditures -- Finance and HR. Historically, they have been at odds neither particularly caring about the worries of the other despite being inextricably linked. This occurs in many ways, but I'm going to focus on four in the order that they seem to arise:

1. Recruiting
2. Cost control and stability
3. Retention
4. Workforce transition

Of course there are many more, but I have some thoughts that link all four of these together. In 2019, that's not always easy as there are constant pushes in Congress to tell employers how much they must pay, which benefits they must provide, and at what costs. How then does one company differentiate itself from another?

To the extent possible, every employer today seems to offer teleworking, flexible work hours, and paid time off banks. While they once were, those are no longer differentiators. After the Affordable Care Act took effect, the health plans at Company X started to look a lot like the health plans at Company Y.

I have a different idea and while I am probably biased by my consulting focus, I am also biased by research that I read. Employees are worried about retiring someday. They are worried about whether they will have enough money or even if they have any way of knowing if they will have enough money. They are worried about outliving their wealth (or lack thereof). They are worried about having the means to support their health in retirement.

I know -- you think I have veered horribly from my original thesis. We're coming back.

Today, most good-sized companies have 401(k) plans and in an awful lot of those cases, they are safe harbor plans. They are an expectation, so having one does not help you the employer in recruiting. While once they had pizzazz, today they are routine. 

Cost stability seems a given, but it's not. Common benchmarks for the success of a 401(k) plan including the percentage of employees that participate at various levels. You score better if your employees do participate and at higher levels. But, that costs more money.

If there's nothing about that program that sets you apart, it doesn't help you to retain your employees. And, as we all have learned, the cost of unwanted turnover is massive often exceeding a year's salary. In other words, if you lose a desirable employee earning $100,000 per year, it is estimated that the total true cost of replacing her is about $100,000. That would have paid for a lot of years of retirement plan costs for her.

There will come a time, however, that our desirable employee thinks it's time to retire. But, she's not certain if she is able. And, even if she works out that she is able, retirement is so sudden. One day, she's getting up and working all nine to five and the next, she has to fill that void. Wouldn't it be great to be able to transition her into retirement gradually while she transitions her skills and knowledge to her replacement?

You need a differentiator. You need something different, exciting, and better. You need to be the kid on the block that everyone else envies. 

You would be the envy of all the others if you won at recruiting, kept your costs level (as a percentage of payroll) and on budget, retained key employees, and had a vehicle that allows for that smooth transition.

I had a conversation with a key hiring executive earlier this month. He said he cannot get mid-career people to come to his organization from [and he mentioned another peer organization]. He was exasperated. He said, "We're better and everyone knows it, but their best people won't come over." I asked him why. He said, "It's that pension and I can't get one put in here." I asked him to tell me more and he explained it as one of those new-fangled cash balance plans with guaranteed return of principal -- i.e., no investment risk for participants, professionally managed assets, the ability to receive 401(k) rollovers, and the option to take a lump sum or various annuity options at retirement. He said that it's the "talk of the town over there" and that even though it seems mundane when you first hear about it, it's their differentiator and it wins for them.

We talked for a while. He wants one. He wants one for himself and he wants one to be as special as his competitor. He wants to be envied too. We talked more.

Stay tuned for their new market-based cash balance plan ... maybe. He and I hope that maybe becomes reality.

Desire to Move to Lifetime Income Options -- Is It Real?

I read an article this morning that tells me, among other things, that two in ten defined contribution (DC) plan participants plan to use some portion of their plan assets to purchase lifetime income products. I don't dispute the research that was done, but I absolutely dispute that behaviors will be as the data imply.

Before you read on, I want to be clear. Any criticism that I have here is not of the author. The piece does an excellent job of explaining what the data say. My criticism is also not of the data collection. The Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) asked legitimate questions and reported the answers that they received.

But, this is a case where I posit that a perfectly good interpretation of perfectly good data is likely to not be a good predictor of future behaviors, at least not as the law exists today. What we need to help these data to be a reliable predictor is a statute that is focused on retirement policy not on the assumption that small groups of people will abuse the Tax Code. And, once that statute works, we need plan designs that give well-meaning plan participants the ability to customize their individual retirement income streams to meet their own needs without worry that somehow they will fall prey to regulations that were written to stop abuse by a few. (For the retirement and tax geeks reading this, yes, sections like 401(a)(9), I mean you.)

Is this newfangled design DC? Maybe or maybe not. Is this newfangled design defined benefit (DB)? Maybe or maybe not. Why do we really need such a broad distinction?

I'll return to the design issues later, but first I am going to make a u-turn back to my comment about these data as predictors.

Yes, two in ten DC plan participants would like to get some lifetime income or longevity protection from their DC plans. But, what options are available? Generally speaking, whether they are in plan or out of plan, they are retail priced annuities (meaning they are priced favorably for the annuity provider and therefore unfavorably for the annuity buyer). There are traditional annuities and there are qualified longevity annuity contracts (QLACs). The experience in the marketplace thus far (anecdotally) is that participants will pay anywhere from 15% to 40% more for these annuities from DC plans than would be considered actuarially equivalent to a lump sum in a DB plan. Insurers need to be both risk-averse and profitable and therein lies a difference. DB plans, on the other hand, are intended, generally speaking, to provide optional forms on an agnostic basis.

So, how do we get there? As I said earlier, changing the statute to allow common-sense streams of income for participants is a great first step. Then we need a new type of design. To me, it probably doesn't fall into the current, common notion of DB or DC.

Let's call it the Plan of the Future.

And, once those common-sense options are available, my prediction is that far more than two in ten participants will want some amount of lifetime income whether it's from DC plans, DB plans, or just qualified retirement plans.

Derisking Your Defined Benefit Plan or Not

Every couple of years, there is a new trend in the remaining corporate defined benefit plans. Lately, it has been derisking in one sense or another. In fact, the Mercer/CFO Research 2015 Pension Risk Survey says that plan sponsors have been spurred by a perfect storm of events.

I'm not going to argue with there having been a perfect storm of events, but I think that everyone else's idea of what constituted the perfect storm is a bit specific and technical. They focus on falling interest rates, a volatile equity market, and a newly (last year) released mortality table. Instead, I would tend to focus on constantly changing pension rules both in the law and in financial accounting requirements that give plan sponsors a constantly moving target.

But, all that said, the study tells us that 80%-90% of plan sponsors are pleased with the risk management actions they have taken to date. What makes them pleased? Is it that they have cleaned up their balance sheets? Is it that their funding requirements have decreased? Has the derisking decision helped them to better focus on or run their businesses?

Isn't that last one what should be at the crux of the matter? The fact is that 2014 was not a good year to offer lump sum payments to individuals with vested benefits if what you were looking to do was to pay out those lump sums when the amounts would be low. Underlying discount rates were very low meaning that lump sums would be larger. Similarly, the cost of annuities was high, but many chose to purchase annuities for substantial parts of their terminated and retired participants.

What all of these plan sponsors did was to decrease future volatility in pension costs (however they choose to think of cost). For many, that truly was a good thing. But, at what cost?

For some, that cost was significant. For others, it was not.

Defined benefit pension plans used to be viewed as having a degree of permanence. That is, when funding them, calculations assumed that the plan would go on forever. While we know that forever is a very long time, we also know that plans with benefits that are based on participants' pay in the last years of their careers are wise to consider the amounts that they are likely to have to pay out in the future as compared to the amounts that would be paid out if everybody quit today. That is not reality. There used to be what are known as actuarial cost methods that allowed sponsors to do that and frankly, they resulted in larger current required contributions. But, those larger current contributions tended to be very steady as a percentage of payroll and that was something that CFOs were comfortable with.

But, the wise minds in Congress with the advice of some key government workers determined that this was not the right way to fund pension plans. Actually, their real reasons for doing so were to reduce tax deductions for pension plan funding thereby helping to balance the budget.

Sounds stupid, doesn't it? It is stupid if what you are doing is making sponsorship of a pension plan untenable for most corporations.

Risk truly became a 4-letter word for pension plan sponsors. As time went by, it became important for sponsors to find new ways to mitigate that risk.

Unfortunately, many of them have been so eager to do that over the last few years that they likely overspent in their derisking efforts. For others, it was clearly the prudent thing to do.

My advice is this if you are considering your first or some further tranche of derisking. Consider the costs. Consider how much risk you mitigate. Make the prudent business decision. What would your shareholders want you to do?

Then decide whether you should derisk.

Doing as They are Doing, Not as They are Saying

Trivia buffs could tell you that the only X-rated movie ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture was Midnight Cowboy (I know, it wouldn't have been X-rated 10 years later, but they had different standards back then). Many who know that would know the theme song from the movie, but paraphrased slightly and with apologies to Harry Nilsson, it could also be the theme for today's defined contribution (DC) plan sponsors:

Everybody's talking at us, But we don't here a word there saying, only the echoes in our minds

Great song if you're one of the six people who has never heard it. But, why, you might ask is this lunatic who hasn't been blogging this week (I talk some time off for the birth of a granddaughter) writing about a 40+ year-old song? Aon Hewitt did a survey of DC plan sponsors and found that only 3% plan to add in-plan annuity or insurance products to their plan in 2011. But, in other surveys, those same plan sponsors are saying that such products are a hot topic and that they are on of their highest DC plan priorities.

Get the song reference now?

Instead of going down what they are hearing and even know is the right path,

They're going where the sun keeps shining, through the pouring rain, they're going with what's closest to their nose

The simple fact is that nobody wants to be first. Yeah, I know, somebody has to be first, but that is often a road fraught with mine fields. But, there was a first 401(k) plan. There was a first cash balance plan. There was once a first target date fund, and now, flawed as they are, very few sponsors are afraid to walk that road once less traveled.

So what are the holdups? In my opinion, it all falls under the category of risk. Once upon a time, if there was no regulatory guidance, the prevailing strategy was to just go out and do it, but no more. With apologies to The Shadow, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts and minds of plaintiff's bar? Litigation is rampant. As a plan sponsor, even if you know you can win, the cost of defense may be prohibitive.

And, look at the guidance that we do have.While we don't have to worry about the safest available annuity rules for DC plans since PPA, the DOL's annuity guidelines for DC plans don't leave much more room for exploration. Having one of these products in your plan is a fiduciary decision. Title I of ERISA is fruitful ground for litigation. Is your plan ready to be the test case?

What happens when your employees leave your company? Can they actually roll these new-fangled products into their new employer's plan? That's a tough one, but as of today, the answer is probably that in most cases, they will have to find a way to keep that option when they leave.

So, everybody seems to want something, but nobody's doing it yet. What might change that?

1. A safe harbor for these products in DC plans so that fiduciaries going down this path will have less worry of regulatory or even litigation issues.
2. A more fertile field of products which will only come when more plan sponsors adopt these sorts of products for their plans.
3. A requirement that DC plans have some sort of lifetime income option as compared to just lump sums (taken by virtually all participants) and installment options. Of course, participants, even those who know that a lump sum has no longevity protection, are currently unlikely to consider anything else.
4. Reasonable fees. The risk for insurers in offering products of this sort are high, especially when there is anti-selection among the group of people electing them. Insurance companies are not in business to lose money, so fees and expenses are currently high. As the market becomes larger, so perhaps will fees and expenses become more competitive.

We're not there yet, but to complete your lyrical madness for the day, perhaps sometime soon, plan sponsors will be moving from where they are and 

Backing off of the lump sum wind, sailing on annuity breeze, skipping over ERISA like a stone ...