Our leadership team tackles tough questions from plan sponsors like you.
Frequently Asked Questions:
A: Many organizations are. Over time, critical plan knowledge often becomes concentrated in a single individual who understands the plan’s history, vendors, procedures, compliance requirements, and unwritten practices. As long as that person remains in place, the arrangement may seem to work well. The problem becomes apparent when they retire, resign, or are unexpectedly unavailable.
In many cases, key information isn’t fully documented. Important plan records may be scattered across shared drives, email folders, and individual desktops. Vendor oversight responsibilities, compliance calendars, governance procedures, and historical decision-making may exist primarily as institutional knowledge rather than formal documentation. When that knowledge walks out the door, the organization can find itself exposed to operational disruptions, compliance failures, and fiduciary risk.
SBA helps plan sponsors strengthen their governance framework by documenting responsibilities, establishing procedures, centralizing critical information, and creating continuity plans that reduce dependence on any one individual. A well-governed retirement plan should be able to withstand personnel changes without losing the knowledge and oversight needed to operate effectively.
A: Even well-designed calculation programs can produce errors over time. We’ve seen situations where calculation logic was inadvertently affected by unrelated system changes, where unique participant scenarios weren’t fully accounted for, or where an incorrect interpretation of plan provisions was built into the original programming. Because these issues can persist unnoticed for years, plan sponsors benefit from proactively reviewing calculations on a regular basis rather than waiting for a participant complaint, audit, or retirement event to uncover a problem.
When errors are identified, the consequences can be significant. Underpayments may require corrective payments with interest, while overpayments can be difficult—or impossible—to recover. In either case, errors can lead to compliance concerns, audit findings, and frustrated participants.
Issues often stem from outdated plan provisions, incomplete or inconsistent data, or incorrect application of formulas. And because many plans have years of amendments and special cases built in, those errors aren’t always obvious until a benefit is paid or reviewed.
SBA helps plan sponsors address both the causes and consequences of calculation errors. We perform targeted reviews of calculation logic and sample populations to identify issues early, before they become widespread problems. When errors are discovered, we validate the impacted population, underlying data, and applicable plan provisions, then work through correction strategies and help ensure calculations are accurate going forward. Getting it right isn’t just about precision—it’s about avoiding rework, reducing risk, and maintaining participant trust.
A: There is no universal threshold. The more important question is whether your population of missing participants is growing, how long those individuals have been unresponsive, and whether you have a process in place to find them.
Many plan sponsors underestimate the scope of the issue. Participants change jobs, relocate, change their names, and pass away without updating their information. Over time, stale addresses, inactive accounts, uncashed checks, and missing beneficiaries can quietly accumulate. In fact, industry research suggests that up to one-third of terminated vested records may contain stale addresses, while standard search methods successfully reunite fewer than 10% of missing participants with their benefits.
Missing participants create more than administrative headaches. They can increase compliance risk, complicate audits and plan transactions, and make it more difficult for plan sponsors to fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities. SBA helps plan sponsors identify and locate missing participants and beneficiaries through a comprehensive search process that combines data analysis, targeted research, and direct outreach. Reuniting participants with their benefits helps reduce risk, improve plan administration, and ensure employees receive the retirement benefits they earned.