The Surgical Amendment post walked through what provisions of 408(b)(2) become redundant once quarterly invoicing replaces projection based disclosure. This post does the affirmative side. Here is the actual statutory text that would add the invoicing requirement to ERISA.The following statutory text would amend Section 408(b)(2) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (29 U.S.C. 1108(b)(2)) by designating…

Two reform conversations are moving through Washington right now. One concerns pharmacy benefit managers. The other concerns retirement plan service providers. They are usually treated as separate policy areas with separate constituencies and separate committee jurisdictions, but structurally, they are the same problem.In both markets, the nominal purchaser is a fiduciary buying services on behalf of beneficiaries. In pharmacy benefits,…

408(b)(2) was designed to give plan fiduciaries the information they need to evaluate service provider compensation. It has not fully achieved that purpose. Seventeen years of Form 5500 data covering thousands of plans, based on my analysis, documents the result: asset-based advisor compensation growing automatically without plan sponsor awareness, advisor compensation continuing after death without detection, including cases where compensation…

Daniel Aronowitz Gave Us the Test. Here’s What It Shows About Small Plan Recordkeeping.Daniel Aronowitz, now EBSA’s Assistant Secretary, spent years arguing that excessive fee litigation was broken because plaintiff attorneys were using bad comparisons. He was largely right. The cases against large university plans routinely used unreliable benchmarks, inflated Form 5500 data, and compared materially different services as if…

FAB 2026-01 has generated substantial commentary from the ERISA bar. Proskauer, National Law Review, ASPPA-Net, PSCA, and others all covered it within 48 hours. The analysis has been thorough and professional, but it has also been written entirely for large plan clients. The Am Law 100 is the annual ranking of the 100 highest-grossing law firms in the United States.…

EBSA issued Field Assistance Bulletin 2026-01 on April 14. The trade press covered it, but nobody noted the most significant detail. To my knowledge, this is the first FAB in the 24-year history of the bulletin program to designate fidelity bond violations as an enforcement priority with a specific completion timeline.Every prior FAB addressed how to apply ERISA’s rules including…