Recent cases against university-sponsored retirement plans include allegations that these plans are complicating the investment decisions of participants because the plans offer too many investment choices.

As alleged in one complaint, the plans provide so many options that participants are left with a "virtually impossible burden" of deciding where to invest their retirement funds.

Whether you are an accountant, lawyer, banker, business consultant or investment advisor, many of your business clients will have a 401(k) or other qualified retirement plan. You may not specialize in retirement plans, but consider the following as the kinds of things you might do to assist your clients and prospects with their retirement plans:

No fee mutual funds are here!

We’ve all read about the lawsuits questioning an employer’s 401(k) investment fund selections and related claims of excessive fund costs. And typically a plan’s professional investment advisor (yes – you should have one unless you have an investment professional on staff) meets with company representatives periodically to discuss a detailed report on fund investment performance and any recommended changes in the plan’s investment fund selections. So, your 401(k) plan files bulge with investment-related materials (and they should!). But what about the rest of an employer’s 401(k) responsibilities?

Fiduciaries who handle investments for 401(k) and other self-directed retirement plans (such as 403(b) plans for not-for-profit organizations) are increasingly exposed to liability for their investment decisions. Those fiduciaries, including employers and any individuals charged with investment decision making, are being second guessed for the investment funds they select. Plan fiduciaries have been sued for a variety of allegations ranging from excessive fees, self-dealing, lack of transparency and poor investment performance. Some of these actions are filed as class actions, and like other fiduciary claims, they assert personal liability against plan fiduciaries.

Your retirement plan may have an outside third party administrator (TPA) to assist with plan administration. However, a TPA typically is not a fiduciary to the plan and does not act as “plan administrator” (that’s usually the employer itself as provided in a typical TPA services agreement). This leaves the employer ultimately responsible for the plan’s compliance with all applicable legal requirements. So, even if your TPA makes a mistake, the employer is likely on the hook for any resulting liability because the TPA’s services agreement usually imposes damage limits and employer indemnities that protect the TPA.

Consider a typical retirement plan sponsored by a private employer. The employer is a fiduciary to the plan along with employees who individually serve as trustees or members of the plan’s investment or retirement committee.

If your organization sponsors a 401(k) or other retirement plan, you or someone in your organization is a fiduciary to that plan. You may have hired a service provider to administer the plan (a third party administrator, or “TPA”), but the buck stops with your organization. This is because the fine print in your TPA’s service agreement says the official “Plan Administrator” is the employer, not the TPA. This means the employer has the ultimate responsibility for the plan’s ERISA compliance.

Many 401(k) plan sponsors have wisely selected investment professionals to assist in selecting the plan’s investment menu, typically a listing of various mutual funds. Other plan sponsors may allocate this duty to company officers and other key employees. In either case, the resident plan fiduciaries (the company officers and key employees who act on behalf of the sponsor as plan administrator or trustee) have a legal duty to “select and monitor” plan investments and, in the case of sponsors who have hired investment professionals – to monitor not only investment performance but also the performance of the investment professionals.