The Department of Labor is planning to study how retirement planning strategies and decisions evolve over time — and it would like to know what you think about the effort.
The DOL’s Employee Benefit Security Administration (EBSA) is soliciting comments on the usefulness of a forthcoming information collection request (ICR), which the regulator plans to deploy in conducting a multi-year household survey that will investigate retirement planning and decisionmaking.
EBSA says it is not only hoping to minimize the cost and time impact of compliance and reporting, but also said it hopes that its request for comment will help the public understand their information collection requirements and provide the requested data in the desired format.
“Gaining insight into Americans’ decisionmaking processes and experiences will provide policymakers and the research community with valuable information that can be used to guide future policy and research,” DOL says. “This investigation will explore a set of research questions on retirement savings, investments, and drawdown behavior by conducting a study that tracks retirees and future retirees over an extended period.”
EBSA states that a primary goal of the project will be to “combine household reports of such items as retirement account contributions and investment allocations with survey responses on planning methods and strategies and on financial advice received to perform a cross-sectional analysis, conditional on other respondent attributes.”
