ERISA’s mid-life crisis

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act was born into a tumultuous world, winning enactment only after years of repeatedly failing to overcome stiff resistance from the nation’s business interests.  

It was signed into law as the country, fatigued from the seemingly endless Vietnam War, was at the same time reeling from the constitutional crisis of Watergate. 

A decade or so earlier, the nation’s attention had been drawn to the need for pension and health benefit reforms after the Studebaker-Packard Corp. shuttered its Indiana automobile factory in 1963. More than 4,000 workers saw their hard-earned pensions go up in smoke. Abuses had occurred before, but the Studebaker case brought home the need for change. 

New York Sen. Jacob Javits took up the legislative mantle and proposed a law in 1967 that would establish an array of new safeguards. But his efforts stalled in Congress, as had previous such attempts. Then, in 1971, a study spearheaded by Javits revealed that only a handful of American workers would actually receive the pension benefits employers were promising. His report drew the media’s attention, which helped to bring the issue to the forefront. 

On Sept. 2, 1974, less than a month after taking office, President Gerald Ford signed the act into law. (Six days later he would go on national television and pardon President Richard M. Nixon.) Signed into law 40 years ago, ERISA spawned the PBGC, vesting and more.

Now, at 40, the law that eventually allowed for the creation of individual retirement accounts and 401(k) plans is functioning in a much different world. 

Few people doubted the necessity of the law at the time of its inception. But a growing chorus of voices now wonders whether the law – amended repeatedly over the years – isn’t in need of an overhaul.

Automatic enrollment mandates, the end of savings limits, better retirement income projections, better fee disclosure, a tightening of the rules for hardship withdrawals. There’s no shortage of ideas on how to make ERISA work better. 

Our sister publication, BenefitsPro.com, interviewed industry leaders, academics and other insiders for their perspectives on what changes in ERISA would most help plan sponsors and plan participants as the law enters its fifth decade.

What follows are their insights and thoughts. So, happy 40^th, ERISA. But be forewarned: your birthday party may not be as well attended as you expected.

Hoping for ‘clear, bright lines’ 

If there’s one thing plan sponsors want above all else, it’s a way to avoid legal hassles.

That’s the very clear impression one gets in surveying some of the country’s most respected legal counsel to employers. Sponsors are just weary of being subjected to the “bewildering labyrinth of ERISA,” as attorney Howard Shapiro puts it.

Based in New Orleans, Shapiro is a partner in the Proskaour ERISA litigation group. He and his team are called on by plan sponsors, service providers, actuaries and others to defend claims brought under ERISA. 

“No one is waking up and saying, ‘Gee, how can I break the law today?’” says Shapiro. 

Yet the lawsuits keep coming, fueled in large part by a lack of clarity in the law that, at least in Shapiro’s way of thinking, exposes sponsors to too much fiduciary liability. 

“Had you told me 1981, when I was born into the ERISA universe, that the world would lack clear remedies to ERISA’s applications on its 40^th birthday, I’d say you were nuts,” says Shapiro.

That’s why he says his clients want one thing that the law seems unable to deliver in its current form: certainty. 

“Some clear, bright lines regarding what is and what isn’t appropriate in communications would be helpful,” suggests Shapiro. 

In other words, regulators can do more to help sponsors by issuing safe harbors to address vague areas of the law, especially those focusing on what kind of advice employers and their representatives can offer workers without exposing themselves to “stock-drop” and other fiduciary-duty types of lawsuits. 

Also frustrating are provisions in the law that tie sponsors’ hands on even mundane matters.

“As a technical matter, many routine transactions are actually prohibited transactions (under the law). For example, a plan sponsor’s decision to use plan assets to pay a service provider is a prohibited transaction,” Marcia Wagner, founding partner in the Boston-based Wagner Law Group, noted in a 2011 brief on the basics of ERISA. 

Better safe harbors 

Fred Reish’s perspective is not so far off from Shapiro’s. In his practice at the Los Angeles offices of Drinker Biddle, where his life’s work has also been devoted to ERISA law, Reish counsels sponsors on compliance before they get served papers and have to prepare for court battle. 

Class exemptions have been instrumental in allowing sponsors to conduct the business of plan design and implementation, while providing them assurance that they are not running afoul of ERISA when they set out to do necessary things like compensate providers to the plan. 

In fact, according to the DOL’s website, as of 2012, “approximately 50 class exemptions covering a wide range of plan transactions” have been granted. 

That means the power exists for the DOL to provide “thoughtful regulatory relief,” says Reish. 

That’s welcome, of course, but not as welcome to sponsors as a makeover, if not a full-blown overhaul, of the law would be. 

Lower fees are just the start

Participants are benefiting from lower fees on their 401(k) plans in ways they weren’t just a few years ago. One small St. Louis, Missouri-based law firm can take a good deal of credit for that, having won several favorable rulings in cases that ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court. 

“It’s good to see that fees have come down as they have received more attention,” says Jerry Schlichter, whose firm, Schlichter, Bogard & Denton, has two cases at the moment waiting to be considered by the high court.

“Continuing that will enhance the retirement of American workers and retirees,” he says.