SECURE Act changes a LOT about 401k plans!

What this episode covers

Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen. Welcome to the People Processes podcast. I'm your host, Rhamy Alejeal, CEO of People Processes, and here we dive deep into the tools, laws and yes processes that you need to know in order to scale and grow your organization. We help organizations all across the United States streamline, optimize, implement, and revolutionize their HR operations. We've helped hundreds of companies and thousands of HR leaders across the world get their people processes right. Today we're going to talk about the SECURE Act. It changes a lot about 401k plans, so we're going to go through it in depth, make sure you're prepared, but before we go too deep, I want to ask you to please subscribe to our podcast. You can find us on iTunes, Google podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, any pod catcher of your choice. You can also subscribe @peopleprocesses.com which will give you exclusive subscriber only content. All right, let's dive into the SECURE Act. The centerpiece of the new tax legislation is the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act of 2019. The SECURE Act, it's chock full of new rules for employers that sponsor qualified retirement plans and for the employees who participate. For example, the new law expands the opportunities for groups of employers to form multiple-employer plans (MEPs). On the employee side, the new law increases the age for required mandatory retirement plan distributions from 70 ½ to 72. Now there are a lot of things going on with the SECURE act, especially around what happens after you die with a 401k. That's an individual planning topic and it's really beyond the scope of what we're gonna talk about today. Instead, we're going to talk about those that are of particular interest to employers. That's what we're focusing on. So part-timer participation, under current rules, employer-sponsored 401(k) plans can exclude an employee from participation if he or she has not worked for the employer for at least 1,000 hours in a 12-month period. Effective for plans beginning after 2020, the new law requires employers to allow long-term part-timers to make elective deferrals to a 401(k) plan if they've worked at least 500 hours in three consecutive 12-month periods. It does not require you to make matching or other employment contributions for these long-term part-timers. Key points are just focusing on this. You won't need to pour through your past payroll records to identify eligible part-timers. For purposes of counting hours under the 500-hour rule, only service performed after 2020 is required to be taken into account. Nevertheless, you need to update your payroll system to pinpoint eligible part-timers going forward. It's a new test. You got to do not just the thousand hour test, but also 500 over three years starting in 2020. Okay. That's a big change. It adds a big layer of compliance and regulation. Hopefully you have a good CPA that'll take care of that for you, but make sure to poke them. Alright. Automatic enrollment. Another big change. Employers that sponsor a 401(k) plan or a SIMPLE IRA for that matter can automatically enroll eligible employees in a plan unless the employee is locked out. The SECURE Act creates a new tax credit for employers that establish new 401(k) plans that include automatic enrollment or that convert an existing plan to an automatic enrollment design. The amount of the credit is $500 per year for each of the three tax years beginning with the first year that the employer adopts automatic enrollment feature. New tax credit applies for tax years beginning after 2019, so employers can begin to cash in on the credit this year. For a new plan, the credit applies in addition to the small employer pension plan startup credit for small employers that adopt a new qualified retirement plan. Moreover, for tax years beginning after 2019, the maximum amount of that credit is increased from $500 to as much as $5,000 per year for three