Love ’em or hate ’em, retirement plan disclosures are a reality – but could they be “better,” and could they be just as effective (and perhaps more so) if they weren’t paper? This week, we’d like to know what you do with those disclosures – what you think participants do with them, and what could be done to make them more effective?
It’s a topic of interest – retirement plans are a complicated business – and a process that adds a lot of cost to the process. At the same time, it’s not altogether clear that the current process is effective, at least in terms of getting participants to read, and perhaps more importantly, understand these disclosures.
It was a topic of discussion at the ERISA Advisory Council last fall, as documented in a recently released report from those discussions.
Concerns remain that many individuals, particularly lower income and/or less-educated, individuals lack access to email or the Internet, and that even those who do might be disinclined to read information delivered to them in that medium. That said, a majority of witnesses testifying at the ERISA Advisory Council meeting concluded that participants do not read the paper that is sent to them, and many have difficulty navigating and understanding the paper disclosures.
In this week’s NAPA Net reader poll, we’d like to know what you think – and what you do – with your own copies of these retirement plan disclosures – and what you think might improve the process.
REPLY to this week’s NAPA Net reader poll at https://www.research.net/r/VTDK3SW.
And we’ll wrap it all up for you on Friday!
