Eliminating the Phone-A-Friend Retirement Plan

I read an article earlier this morning informing me that employees don't really understand 401(k) plans. News Flash: that's not news. In fact, looking at behavior of employees and overhearing casual conversations between otherwise intelligent 401(k) participants about the value of their 401 plans, their 201k (when they are underperforming expectations), their 501k (when they are overperforming expectations), and the ways that they choose investment options, this sounds like a statement from Captain Obvious.

How did 401(k) plans get this way? In their earlier incarnations, typical 401(k) plans gave employees an option to defer. In most plans, employees that did choose to defer got a match from their employers. Employees could then invest those assets within the plan in usually about five to eight options.

I recall a conversation back in the early 1990s with an individual who is now on every list of the great minds of the 401(k) world and the great innovators in the 401(k) world. This individual told me that no defined contribution plan needs more than six investment options ... ever .. and that any plan sponsor with more than six should be lined up with their adviser before a firing squad (the words are not precise, so no quotation marks, but they are pretty darned close). The same individual later became one of the leading proponents of a 'full menu' of options with at least one and often more than one from each asset class and each investment style within that asset class.

How exactly do employees benefit from such choices? They don't.

Suppose I choose three highly rated large cap funds from US News's report:

• T Rowe Price Institutional Large Cap Core Growth Fund
• Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund
• JP Morgan Intrepid Growth Fund

Let's imagine that they are all in my fund's lineup. How do I choose?

Intrepid sounds like a cool name. Maybe I should pick that. Blue Chip? My grandfather told me to invest in blue chips. I wonder if that's still true today. And, that long name? If it does all those things, it must be really good, too.

I could read the prospectuses. I could do research on performance history. I could look at investment styles and drift whatever all that means. I could phone a friend.

The simple fact is that for most of us, it's a crap shoot ... plain and simple. 

Because of that, despite all the forecasts in the world from 401(k) lovers, this should not ever be a primary plan for employees. As it was intended back in the late 70s and early 80s, this should be a supplemental savings plan -- an addition to what you get in your primary plan.

Your primary plan should be just that. It should be employer-provided. It should not be confusing. There should be no need for a phone a friend option. 

I don't care what kind it is although I have my biases. My bias is that the plan should provide for the ability for participants to take distributions in lump sums or wholesale-priced annuities (my term for annuities on a fair actuarial basis without middle men making profits at your expense). My bias is that the determination of your benefits in the plan should be simple. My bias is that assets should be professionally managed. 

I don't care what label you give to such a plan. I don't even care what label ERISA or the Internal Revenue Code gives to such a plan. What I do care about is that you not lose sleep over whether Intrepid is better than Blue Chip or conversely. What I do care about is that if you choose to annuitize your account balance that you get an annuity that is 100% of what you deserve not some number closer to 80%. 

And, for your supplemental savings, you can have your Phone-A-Friend ... oops, I meant 401(k) plan.

Imagining Retirement Plans Through the Eyes of a Child

Imagine retirement plans. Imagine retirement plans through the eyes of a child (gratuitous Moody Blues reference for readers in my age range).

I know, this sounds really strange. Of all the people who are not thinking about retirement, kids are at the top of that list. Bear with me though. I will bring you back.

Before I do, however, think back to when you were a child. You probably either lived in a house on a street where there were other kids or in an apartment where there were other kids around or went to school where there were other kids. One way or another, most of us found ourselves around other children.

Now, think about what really made you beam with pride and joy. There were lots of things -- good grades, winning a game or a race, and being the first kid on the block to have something that every kid wanted. It didn't have to be something big. But, if you had it first, every kid wanted to be you.

I promised that I would bring you back and I'm going to start now. Take yourself out of the mind of a child. At least do that a little bit, but we're going to be meandering back and forth a bit on this short journey.

Think about the employer-employee relationship. Some employees want a job; others want a career. Some employees want a paycheck; others want to be somewhere where they want to come to work. Some employers want to have employees who collect a paycheck and perhaps as small a paycheck as the employer can get away with; others want to be employers of choice.

From an excellent article in Fast Company, "[O]ne of the top factors most likely to keep professionals at their company for 5+ years ... is having strong workplace benefits ... ." The article continued, "[I]n comparison, the least enticing factor for keeping professionals at their current companies is having in-office perks such as food, game rooms, and gyms."

Employers that want to be employers of choice will care about this stuff. And, so will employees. And, many of these employees actually do remember being children. Just as I do, they remember things like spending a nickel on a stick of Topps bubble gum that came with five baseball cards and upon opening the pack seeing that they were the first kid they knew of to get a Mickey Mantle. You really do have something special then.

Often times, employers that want to be employers of choice want that because they know that the cost of unwanted employee turnover is so high. In fact, when companies are counting their beans, if they use 150% of one year's pay as a proxy for the cost of an unplanned and unwanted turnover of a professional employee, then 1) they are likely pretty close, and 2) they will realize that the cost of benefits probably pales in comparison to the cost of turnover.

One of those benefits that we mentioned is a retirement program (note that I talk about a program not an individual plan). Most companies, or certainly many if not most, have 401(k) plans. Their employees don't really know what they are, but everybody thinks they are important, and, in fact, they are. So, giving an employee a 401(k) plan doesn't make her feel special when she looks at it through her eyes of a child.

But, suppose I told her that I had a special plan for her. We don't have to give that plan a name. Suppose I told her that I, her employer, value my employees and that I was going to give her something like a match, but that it was better. Suppose I told her that I was going to auto-enroll her in our 401(k) plan because everybody says auto-enrollment is a best practice, but even if a year came where she had to stop deferring to the 401(k) plan, I was still going to contribute the same 5% of pay to her retirement account. And, by the way, those assets that accumulated from those over and over again five percents were going to grow based on professional investments. And, someday when she retires, she'll be able to take her benefit as a lump sum, or as an annuity, or as some combination of the two.

Imagine how a child thinks about that.

The child's eyes light up.

She is the first kid on her block to have this special benefit.

She is special.

Using Retirement Benefits to Solve the Challenge of Hospital Sector Employment

One of my colleagues sent me an interesting article last night. It reminded me that hospitals, perhaps more than any other classification of employer in the US have particularly interesting challenges when it comes to attracting and retaining their employees, mostly professionals. And, as hospital organizations have become a primary employer of physicians, the difficulties only increase.

Let's consider the employee population of a hospital or hospital system. We can start with physicians. From a retirement compliance standpoint, they are probably all highly compensated employees (HCEs) meaning that their compensation, roughly speaking, exceeds $120,000 per year. But, not all physicians are paid the same. The general practitioners and internists, for the most part, are among the lowest paid of the group. At the other end, surgeons, cardiologists, anesthesiologists, and a group often referred to as critical care physicians are among the higher paid. Despite their pay, supply of these specialists may be less than demand. In order for a particular hospital system to meet their own demand, they need something that appeals to those physicians.

Let's turn our focus to nurses. They're often thought of as the life-blood of the hospital. They are skilled professionals, not all that highly paid, and they have a high turnover rate due to burnout. Informal survey data shows that retention of nurses is often due to one of several factors including a great work environment and great benefits.

Then there are the technicians. To someone just collecting data, they may look a lot like nurses. But digging deeper shows that they are not. They have different skill sets and different mindsets. Their pay may be similar to that of nurses, but their jobs would appear to have different stress levels. As a result, their turnover rates due to burnout seem to be lower.

And, there are the true blue collar staff in the hospitals. While they may have learned specific skills and duties that make them more valuable to hospitals than they are in other industries, in many cases, they can find other employment outside of the hospital industry. These people are generally among the lower paid in the systems and probably value straight pay and their health benefits as much as anything.

Finally, we'd be remiss in not mentioning all the other staff from the people who run the hospital systems -- the top executives -- to the administrative staff. All have usually developed specific skill sets that make them particularly valuable in a hospital system where they might not be in other industries. They tend to want to stay with a good organization, but they expect a lot before they would call that organization good.

Moreso than many other industries, what we've pointed out here is that this is a really diverse population. As a group, they are intelligent and well-educated. As a group, they have high-stress jobs. That combination leads to a need for retirement benefits.

But, how do we provide them? The top executives want to be treated as top executives. The physicians have large tax burdens and providing for their heirs that they worry about. The nurses may have relatively shorter careers and, according to data, do not always make saving for retirement a top priority early in their careers.

The current method of choice is to use a deferral sort of arrangement perhaps with a match. So, that would be a 401(k) plan or a 403(b) for some tax-exempt hospitals. There are problems galore there. The physicians complain because they just can't defer that much (maybe even less if nondiscrimination testing is a problem). The nurses who don't focus on retirement suddenly see that between their high-stress, high-turnover jobs and their neglect of their retirement plans early in their careers that retirement may never be an option. Behaviors will likely vary among the other staff.

We need other methods. Those other methods are there.

Suppose we tell the doctors that they can defer more -- a lot more. Suppose we tell the nurses and the technicians that they will still have an opportunity to defer, but that we are going to give them something akin to their matching contribution even if they forget to pay attention to retirement. Suppose we tell the executives that all that nonqualified money that's not secure and not tax-effective can be.

We might have people dying [yes, a very bad pun] to work for our system. When you become the employer of choice, work shortages are less of an issue for you, unwanted turnover is less of an issue for you, and yes, patient satisfaction and therefore profitability will improve.

You need a solution that meets all of these criteria:

• Costs are stable
• Ability for very high-paid people to defer significantly is there
• Nondiscrimination testing is easy to pass
• Benefits are portable
• Both lump sums and wholesale priced annuities (annuities from the plan as compared to from a mutual fund provider or insurer) are available

The solution lies in designs like these. Costs can be controlled through proper design. Physicians wanting larger deferrals will happily pay for their own enhancements. Because these plans test so well, nonqualified money can often be qualified. Benefits will be portable for everyone and annuities will be available without lining the pockets of insurers for any participants who want them.

it really should be the best of all worlds for hospital systems.

Saving for Retirement in a President Trump World

I know this sounds like a politically charged topic, but it's not intended to be. I just want to pose the situation to let readers know a few things. While the Trump platform didn't particularly address retirement issues, how will retirement be affected?

In order to understand this, let's consider a few key non-retirement items that both the Republican-controlled Congress and President-Elect Trump have weighed in on to one extent or another:

• Repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)
• Replace the ACA with a framework that is expected to feature competition across state lines, high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), and a la carte shopping for health plans (you insure what you want to insure to the extent that such coverage is available)
• Simplified (somewhat) Tax Code with lower marginal tax rates for most taxpayers
• Elimination of the Head of Household status for filing taxes

As I've remarked many times, our current retirement system for American workers is not what it was, for example, 30 years ago. It's no longer the norm to have the solid three-legged stool of

• the defined benefit (DB) pension plan from the company you spent most of your career with
• your personal savings in a high-return savings or money market account (you probably even had your choice of a free toaster or alarm clock when you opened the account)
• Social Security

Recall that 401(k) plans were in their infancy and even employees who had them didn't tend to make heavy use of them. 

Under the new [proposed] regime, personal responsibility will be king. Out of your higher after-tax income (not significantly higher for most Americans unless the economy booms to where employers are inclined to offer higher compensation to their employees), you'll need to save for retirement and make HSA deductions to accumulate a rainy-day fund just in case you have a high-cost medical expense. Is that practical?

Under the ACA, $10,000 annual health care deductibles are not all that uncommon. So, you'll want to build up your HSA account to ensure that you're not bankrupted by a large medical expense or even by one that you choose to not purchase coverage for. Let's say you choose to defer the family limit for 2017 -- $6,750. Further, since you've been reading about it online, you need to defer, say, 10% of your family income of $75,000 per year (or $6,250 per month) (well above the national median of about $52,000) or $7,500 to your 401(k). Let's add to that your $2,000 per month house payments (including escrow) and your $750 per month car payments (including insurance) and see where you are before basics like utilities, food, and clothing.

We start with $75,000 and let's pull out 22% of that for federal, state, and FICA taxes bringing you down to $58,500. Let's take out another $4,000 per year for health care through your employer (we'll assume they are subsidizing it) and you're down to $54,500. Now subtract your HSA, 401(k), house payments, and car payments and you're down to $7,750. That's $650 per month to pay for food, clothing, gasoline, and to build up a rainy day account, and you haven't even had a chance to buy anything because you just wanted it.

As they said in the movie, something's gotta give. What's it going to be? My guess is that the first thing you cut back on is your retirement savings. You'll worry about that in some future year. Or, will you? Recent history suggests you won't. 

People who retired 30 years ago tended to be much more prepared for retirement despite their lack of 401(k) plans. They were intended to be merely supplemental to employer-provided pension benefits. Is it possible that the Trump Administration should consider the benefits of incentives to get us back into a DB-biased world? Just asking.

Thinking About Compensation -- Cash and Otherwise

Suppose someone asks you how much you get paid. Probably the first thought that comes to mind for you is something like that your base pay is some amount of money per year or that you earn some amount per hour. You might include bonuses in your thoughts, or if you are hourly paid, you might include some overtime that you typically get. Let's just say, hypothetically, and because it's an easy number to work with, that your base pay is $100,000 per year and that you are not bonus eligible.

You're pretty happy in your job, but one evening, you get a call out of the blue from a recruiter or headhunter, if you prefer, who tells you that she would like to talk to you about a job in your field that has a budget of $110,000 per year. My question for you would be whether relative to your $100,000, is that $110,000 a good deal?

It seems obvious, doesn't it? You'd be getting a raise. But, it's not really that simple. Your current employer has a defined benefit pension plan and a 401(k) plan. They also provide you with a good health care program, four weeks of vacation per year, and some other benefits that probably don't seem like they will make a difference to you. Your potential new employer just has pretty basic health care and a garden variety 401(k) plan. They will start you at two weeks of vacation, but you work your way up to four weeks after ten years with the new company.

What should you do?

To people who often read my blog, the analysis is pretty simple, but to the average person, it's not. They often don't understand the value of these various benefits. And, that's why they tend to look at pay alone and perhaps the amount of vacation time that they are getting and whether or not their work schedule or work site (office versus home) will have any flexibility. That's work in 2016.

Suppose you are the employer and you happen to be the employer that offers good benefits, but doesn't pay quite as much as some of the employers against whom you compete for talent. I have an idea for you. Suppose you created a tool, or model if you prefer, to help prospective employees to compare what they are currently receiving with what you are offering them. It sounds like you've already made the commitment that you're not going to win on pay alone, so you have to find a way to make them understand the value.

Let them input all these various components side-by-side and see which one is the winner, especially if the pay you are offering is sufficient for them to live on. If you want to get even more sophisticated, you could tax-effect it.

Interestingly, the same concept works in executive compensation.

A company recently asked me to benchmark their executive retirement benefits (of course, those benefits are pay related). So, if their plans are 50th percentile, but their pay is only 40th percentile, then in reality, their plans fall short (50th percentile applies to 40th percentile gets you to somewhere less than 50th percentile retirement value), and conversely if you pay above the 50th percentile and provide 50th percentile retirement benefits.

It's surprising to me how often looking at things this way is a revelation. Perhaps you need that revelation.

Opinion: American Workers Need Pensions and They Should Look Like This

Since I last blogged, I've seen a lot of survey data. Among the very compelling themes has been that Americans are afraid that they will not have enough money with which to retire. Those fears are well founded for many.

As I've written here many times, the 401(k) plan was never intended to be the primary retirement source of retirement income for American workers. Neither was Social Security. Rather, Social Security was intended to be a supplement to bridge people for what was usually just a few years of retirement before death. Section 401(k) was a throw-in in a late 70s tax law that was suddenly discovered. It was intended to give companies a way to help their employees to save more tax effectively. And, remember, in the late 70s, the norm was that whatever company employed you at age 35 was likely to be your last full-time employer. ERISA had recently become law and most American workers had defined benefit pensions. These plans were designed to assist employers in recruiting and retaining employees.

Then, again, as I've written many times, along came change through the government and through quasi-governmental organizations. Employers didn't like the mismatch between cash flow requirements and financial accounting charges. New pension funding laws, beginning in 1987, were designed not to ensure responsible funding of pension plans, but to provide an offset to tax expenditures (a fancy name for tax breaks and government overspending). Looking at it from the standpoint of someone in Congress trying to decrease tax expenditures, if you can decrease required company contributions, you decrease their tax deductions, and thus cut those evil tax expenditures.

Nearly 30 years later, pensions have tried hard to go the way of the dinosaur. The fact is, however, that there are still lots of defined benefit pension plans out there. But, they don't look the same as they did 30 years ago. The laws have changed, creative minds have been at work, and new and better designs have emerged.

American workers generally should have employer-provided defined benefit pension plans. But, since these creative minds have been at work, what exactly should these new plans look like?

• While they offer a sense of stability in retirement, annuity payments do not appeal to many Americans and they do not necessarily understand them. So, while all defined benefit plans must have annuity options, they should also have lump sum options.
• The plans should not be "back-loaded" (a term that means that most of your accruals and therefore cost to your employer emerges late in your career). The typical final average pay plan of yesteryear was designed so that most of your accruals occurred close to or after you were eligible to retire. This made some sense when you spent your whole career with one employer. But, in 2016, that very rarely happens. So, plans should accrue benefits fairly ratably.
• Benefits should be portable. That is, you should be able to take them with you either to an IRA or to another employer. This works best if there is a lump sum option through which you can take a direct rollover and maintain the tax-deferred status.
• Employer costs should be predictable and stable. This can be achieved when there is no longer a mismatch between assets and liabilities in a plan.
• Employers should see that plan assets are professionally managed, but fluctuations in asset returns from those that are expected can be borne by plan participants.

This sounds like pension nirvana, doesn't it? Such plans and designs can't possibly exist.

Well, they do. 

The plan design that accomplishes this is often known as a Market Return Cash Balance Plan (MRCB).

While an MRCB carries with it all of the required characteristics of defined benefit plan and it looks a lot like a 401(k) or other defined contribution plan, it brings with it additional benefits. It satisfies all of the bullets I've outlined above. Budgeting gets easy and predictable. There is no "leakage" due to sudden expenses when a participant's car decides to break down or an unexpected flood ravages their house.

An MRCB is very suitable to be a primary retirement plan. You want to save a bit extra? That's what your 401(k) plan is for. 

If you are an employer and you're reading this, you really need to know more, don't you?

Frightening Data on DC Plan Ownership

According to an article in this morning's News Dash from Plan Sponsor, fewer families had an individual account retirement plan (defined contribution or IRA) in 2013 than in 2010. However, on the bright side, average account balances have increased over the same period.

What do we learn from this? It's difficult to know for sure, but as is my wont on my blog, I'm going to take a shot at working it out.

Why are average account balances up? Well, the equity markets have performed pretty well over the last few years. Combine that with the fact that there has been time for additional contributions to those accounts and this makes sense. When we combine this, however, with my rationale for the prevalence of accounts decreasing, it may look troubling.

That the number of families with individual account retirement plans is decreasing suggests underlying issues with the economy. What I suspect is that many long-term unemployed or under-employed have had to liquidate accounts that they had a few years ago in order to survive. People laid off from jobs have taken distributions rather than rollovers to live on. I suspect that more often than not, these have been total distributions from smaller accounts. By eliminating some of the smaller account balances, the average and median accounts have grown in size.

That only about 50% of families have individual retirement accounts and only about 65% have any retirement plan at all is not good news for our future economy. How will the remaining 35% live? Moreover, among those 65%, will they have enough to survive in retirement?

The way it looks to me is that for people who are able to fully utilize their 401(k) or other retirement program for their entire working lifetimes, retirement may be comfortable. But this data suggests that this will be a substantial minority. For the rest, the retirement system is failing us.

30 years ago, defined benefit (DB) plans were the bulwark of the corporate retirement system. After years of Congressional meddling, many employers consider DB plans to be impractical. At the same time with further emphasis on individual responsibility, the burden of providing a retirement benefit has been shifted largely to employees.

If you are good at Googling or Binging, you can easily find projections from lots of smart people showing that a good 401(k) plan will be sufficient for responsible employees to retire on. In my opinion, most of these projections are deficient. You just don't see projections that consider leakage including:

• Unemployment for a meaningful period of time
• The necessity to take a job for a short or long time that does not have a savings plan
• Increased cost-shifting of all benefits to the employee which may reduce an employee's ability to save
• High-deductible health plans which force employees in many cases to pay significant amounts out-of-pocket for health care

This data is frightening. The retirement system is severely broken. Too many times, the public policy behind the retirement system has been abused by tax policy. We are left with retirement plans being a toy for Congress to make bills seemingly budget neutral. 

The ability to retire is part of the 21st century American Dream. This data suggests that the retirement part of the dream may be just that -- a dream.

Not pretty ...

Blip Theory -- The Downfall of 401(k) Outcome Theory

Most of the non-regulatory material that I read about 401(k) plans these days deals with participant outcomes. In fact, outcome seems to be one of the big buzzwords for 2014. We are suddenly talking about financial outcomes, health outcomes, and every other kind of outcome you can think of.

Don't get me wrong, I think it would be great if we all have wonderful outcomes. I just don't believe the studies that tell us how to get there.

In the typical piece that I read, I learn that in order to get the best outcomes, participants should begin saving at the beginning of their working career, increase the percentage of their pay that they save over time and convert their account balance (one way or another) to an inflation-adjusted annuity for longevity protection.

That's great. And, when a smart person models what will happen if a young adult follows this guidance, that person will always be destined to have a highly prosperous retirement.

But, it seems that very few people, even those who started saving when they were fairly young, are actually on target to have that very prosperous retirement.

Why not? What happened?

Life happened.

None of these models seem to reflect real life. In real life, people have periods of unemployment. During that unemployment, they stop saving. In fact, to the extent that those people have not also saved well outside of their 401(k), many will need to take distributions from those very 401(k) plans (paying income tax and the early distribution excise tax) just to stay afloat.

Where is this event in the models?

In real life, many young people actually do start to save at a modest rate and gradually increase the amount that they save. But, in real life, many of those people choose to have children and some will have them without having made a truly conscious decision to do so. Kids cost more money than anyone seems to think they will. That increase in savings rate often fails to be sustainable.

Where is this event in the models?

In real life, in 2014, an awful lot of people participate in high-deductible health plans. They are told that one of the great tax benefits of the modern world comes to people who put money away in a health savings account (HSA) to fund the high deductible part of their plans. This is a great idea as well, but real wages have not been increasing for probably the last 15 or more years. This model expects participants to save upwards of 10% of compensation in their 401(k) plans and an additional, say, $4000 per year in their HSAs. That's a lot of money. I think more people than not would tell you that this is just not feasible.

Where is this conundrum in the models?

Purchasing an in-plan annuity or taking an annuity distribution in your 401(k) is often an excellent idea. But, not all plans have them. Among those that do, many are not offered on a particularly favorable or attractive basis. The models that I have seen use a current, no-profit basis for converting your account balance to an annuity.

Where can I get one of these annuities on which an insurer makes no profit?

I'm all for wonderful outcomes. But, somebody needs to merge blip theory with outcome theory. Under blip theory, and I have never heard the term used before the morning of January 17, 2014, just as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to wonderful outcomes is paved with potholes hereinafter known as blips. When models start including realistic numbers of blips, I'll start to believe the expected outcomes.

401(k) 3.0?

Mark Iwry (pronounced eevry) gave a speech at the 2012 PLANSPONSOR National Conference in Chicago. I wasn't there, so I am taking PLANSPONSOR's reporting on it as the gospel. Mr. Iwry apparently spoke on the topic of version 3.0 of 401(k) plans.

Before discussing Mr. Iwry's recommendations, I think it's appropriate to provide a little of his impressive resume for those who don't know. Currently, he is senior adviser to the secretary and deputy assistant secretary (retirement and health policy), U.S. Department of Treasury. If you were unable to work it out from the title, that means he is a policy adviser for the federal government. Previous to that, he has been a Principal with the Retirement Security Project, a Senior Fellow with the Brookings Institution, and Counsel with the Department of Treasury. The two roles previous to his current one were related as the Retirement Security Project appears to be a part of the Brookings Institution.

This c.v. would seem to establish that Mr. Iwry is an intelligent man. He has spent a career working in positions in the government and in think tanks that require significant intellect. But, note something that is missing in Mr. Iwry's resume -- he appears to have never been employed by a traditional corporate entity. None of his employers have been focused on profits.

According to the PLANSPONSOR summary, Mr. Iwry laid out five ideas as part of 401(k) version 3.0:

1. Increase the use of automatic enrollment and do it at higher levels than 3% [presumably through automatic escalation]. Use automatic enrollment for existing employees as well as new ones.
2. Stretch the match by doing something like providing a 33 cents on the dollar match on the first 10% of pay deferred instead of a more traditional 50 cents on the first 6%.
3. Give lower-paid employees a higher rate of match.
4. Decrease the eligibility waiting period, or at least decrease it for employee deferrals.
5. Accept rollovers from other plans.

You see, there is a reason that I laid out Mr. Iwry's resume. While any of these ideas might improve the ability of our workforce, taken as a whole to retire, most have another side of the proverbial coin.

Automatic enrollment works really well in some cases. However, I have looked at a lot of 401(k) data. Two things have jumped out to my eyes with plans that use automatic enrollment:

• New employees tend to defer at the automatic rate.
• When automatic enrollment is forced on existing employees, a large number wind up decreasing their deferrals, because they simply do not read their communications from HR and they get-auto-enrolled at levels lower than those at which they were deferring.

Mr. Iwry's second idea may have a lot of merit. In fact, I blogged about it more than 18 months ago. In that post, I discussed a Principal survey based on their client base. It suggested that changing from a match of dollar for dollar on the first 2% deferred to a match of 25 cents on the dollar for the first 8% deferred tended to cost the employer less, but left employees better prepared for retirement. I would love to see similar data prepared by other 401(k) recordkeepers to see if it holds true across a broader universe. 

The third idea is nice. Theoretically, it's nice. Many companies would tell you, however, that it does not make business sense to do this. In fact, I called a corporate Vice President of Human Resources while I was working on this post. He told me, under promise of anonymity, that this is a nice idea, but makes no practical sense. He went on that that there are two ways to accomplish this -- either increase the match for lower-paid employees which cost more money, or cut the match for high-paid employees which hurts morale among the producers.

In my experience, many companies that have a waiting period for a particular benefit do it for one of three reasons:

• It's expensive to set up a record for someone who may not be around for long.
• It's a waste of money to provide a benefit to someone who may not be around for long (yes, I know that they can put a vesting schedule on a match).
• They have so many new employees who don't last long that the increased level of paperwork would overburden HR.

Accepting rollover contributions seems to be a no-brainer. For plans of any meaningful size, the only reason not to do it is the additional fees that a plan might be paying on the additional asset base. But, there is an answer to this. Negotiate up front that this won't cost extra money. If you can't negotiate it out, decide if you can live with the extra cost.

However, 401(k) 3.0? These are not a bunch of revolutionary ideas. There is nothing in here about investments. There is nothing in here about lifetime income options. It just doesn't seem that new.

CBO, We Have A Problem

Sometime back, I wrote, not with admiration, about the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the 'scoring' rules that our Congress has burdened it with. Essentially, they don't adjust for inflation and they don't do dynamic scoring. Or, said differently, they are required to treat each bill as its own micro-economy, forecast for only 10 years, and  generally not reflect inflation. This approach allows the Congress to manipulate bills so as to score them as cost-neutral, or even as cost-savers, when in reality, everyone, including both Congress and the CBO, know that they are going to cost us a lot of money.

How much money? Does the number 15 trillion mean anything to you? The federal debt, according to the debt clock is now just above that number. It's a big number. It has 12 zeroes in it. It also has two other digits to the left of those zeroes.

I would posit that these rules and Congress' manipulation of these rules are responsible for a significant portion of that 15 trillion. In fact, and I'm just guessing (no calculator or spreadsheet in action here, not even any mental math), if I had to choose an over/under amount, more than half of that 15 trillion in debt has accumulated from flawed scoring.

I'm not saying that the CBO does poor math, in fact, they are very good at it. What I am saying is that the constraints that they are required to follow have caused the United States to underprice the costs of various bills by a really big number and I am guessing (that means that I don't know, but my brain now fully caffeinated for the day has estimated) that this number in the aggregate is more than half of 15 trillion dollars!

When I try to hide my political biases, I usually work in alphabetical order and I'm going to do that here. In this case, the Democrats are incredibly guilty of having gamed this system ... and they know it. In this case, the Republicans are incredibly guilty of having gamed this system ... and they know it. Most of the public doesn't know it. There has never been a public outcry. There should be.

So, what does this have to do with employee benefits? The good folks at the Employee Benefits Research Institute (EBRI) have a nice little chart (actually it's not so little) that they call Employee Benefit Tax Expenditures -- White House Fiscal Year 2011 Budget Estimates. It shows that the tax expenditure (that's a fancy name for the amount of deductions that people and corporations get on their taxes, either through deductions or through tax exemptions) for employer contributions for health care benefits in FY 2011 is in the neighborhood of $175 billion and  similarly, for employment based retirement plans, it's about $110 billion. That's $285 billion in total. The mortgage interest deduction for the same year is about $105 billion. So, employee benefits are a really big culprit.

I bet my readers know that those numbers go up every year. Of course, they do, inflation makes them go up, doesn't it? Suppose we adjust for inflation. Then, what happens? Well, EBRI can help us out with that as well. Here is the url for a spreadsheet (http://www.ebri.org/pdf/publications/books/databook/Table 5.2 Inflation Adjust.xls), and you'll have to copy and paste this one, that shows what happens when we adjust for inflation. Look at the spreadsheet. Find me a major element that decreases on an inflation-adjusted basis. You can't do it, can you? And, therein lies a problem of just enormous proportions.

The 10-year cost of many of these bills is understated because the CBO isn't allowed to use assumptions that faithfully project the cost. And, because cost increases tend to (read that as virtually always) significantly outstrip inflation, using virtually any 10-year cost projections for a bill that is expected to last for a long time (think Social Security or Medicare, for example) represents among the most significant frauds ever perpetuated on the American taxpayers.

Yes, I said it. It's a fraud.

It's time for the taxpayers to stand up to Congress.

I haven't used song lyrics in this blog for a while, but I'm going to go back to the Vietnam War era for this one. With thanks to Jefferson Airplane,

got a revolution got to revolution 
Who will take it from you 
We will and who are we 
We are volunteers of america

Change volunteers to taxpayers and ...