Every retirement plan is required to have a formal written document that spells out how it operates.
When Congress passes new laws that impact how retirement plans work, the IRS and other agencies create new regulations to reflect these changes and, as you might expect, some need to be incorporated into your plan document. The formal rewrite and re-adoption of your plan document is a called a restatement. Given the hundreds of thousands of qualified retirement plans, the government established a pattern of multi-year cycles to balance all of the required work.
Your Defined Benefit plan is modeled on a pre-approved prototype or volume submitter document that’s part of a cycle that must be restated every six years. It’s important to know that the deadline to restate your plan is April 30th 2020. This current cycle is related to The Pension Protection Act of 2006 which introduced many important changes to retirement plans. You may hear this referred to as the “PPA Restatement.”
It’s a big project and our goal is to complete it well in advance of the government’s deadline. We’ll be reaching out to communicate more information about the details of the restatement process and the costs associated with completing this essential work for you.