Most retirement plan reviews start with a benchmark, but I prefer starting with questions.Who is being paid? How much? For what? Who is actually paying? How was the arrangement created? What has changed? What work is actually being performed? Who chose the providers? What incentives do they have? And would the employer make the same purchasing decision if the services
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What 7,000 Conversations With Plan Sponsors Taught Me About Retirement Plans
By Paul Sippil
What I’ve learned about plan-sponsor psychology from a database of conversations I’ve compiled since 2009Since 2009, I have kept records of conversations with people responsible for retirement plans. The database now contains more than 7,000 phone conversations, along with the circumstances surrounding the calls, what sponsors said and, when there was a follow-up, what happened afterward. I started keeping the…
Your Retirement Plan Fees are Really a Pay Cut
By Paul Sippil
Ask a participant what they pay in retirement plan fees and most cannot answer. In my experience reviewing retirement plans since 2009, almost nobody can. The data point in the same direction. A 2021 GAO report found that almost 40 percent of retirement plan plan participants do not fully understand and have difficulty using the fee information plans are required…
Beyond Benchmarking: What Plan Comparisons Can’t Tell You About Your Retirement Plan
By Paul Sippil
If you spend enough years reviewing Form 5500 filings, you begin to notice things that do not fit neatly into a benchmarking report. That was not where this research started. When I began reviewing retirement plans in 2009, I was simply trying to understand why employers with seemingly similar plans often paid very different amounts for what appeared to be…
The Advisor Model Nobody Else Runs
By Paul Sippil
Every advisory practice has to answer one question. Who is the client?The retirement industry settled on an answer long ago, and almost nobody questions it. For many advisory firms, the economics revolve around the participant’s future wealth, and the retirement plan becomes the means of acquiring that relationship. I built my practice around the opposite answer.The retirement plan is my…
The Invoicing Amdendment Secure 3.0 Should Include
By Paul Sippil
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 Efforts, One Structural Problem
By Paul Sippil
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,…
The Surgical Amendment: What Invoicing Replaces in 408(b)(2) and What Stays
By Paul Sippil
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…
The Test Already Exists – EBSA Just Hasn’t Applied it to the Right Market
By Paul Sippil
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…
Field Assistance Bulletin 2026-01 and the 88%: What the ERISA Bar Missed
By Paul Sippil
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.…