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401k missing participants blog posts
Building Out the Clearinghouse Our Retirement System Demands
On March 5, 2025, Retirement Clearinghouse (RCH) released a landmark whitepaper – Building Out Clearinghouse Services for the U.S. Retirement System: A Blueprint for a Digital Infrastructure. In this article, RCH's Tom Hawkins, a co-author of the paper, summarizes the high-level, compelling case for expanding the set of clearinghouse services beyond auto portability, and explains why this initiative is absolutely required in order to "create a retirement ecosystem that does what it should have done all along: protect workers’ savings as they move through their careers, not lose them along the way."
RCH Consolidation Corner Channel Ep. 22 - Solving the Mystery of Missing Participants
Welcome to the 22nd episode of the RCH Consolidation Corner Channel, where we provide audio content that explores key issues in the preservation and consolidation of retirement savings. In this episode, we offer you some helpful tips in dealing with the issue of missing and unresponsive participants in retirement plans. We hope you’ll find the audio enjoyable and informative.
Pro Tips for Locating Missing Participants
When plan sponsors consider missing participants, their predominant emotion is likely to be frustration – driven by a caseload of missing or unresponsive participants that defy resolution. As an administrator of IRAs, a 401(k)-plan sponsor and a provider of commercial search services, Retirement Clearinghouse (RCH) understands completely. With that in mind, RCH’s Tom Hawkins assembles some useful tips from our search “pros” – practical ideas for locating missing plan participants and keeping participant data in shape.
Beyond Missing: Targeting Unresponsive Participants in Retirement Plans
Writing in the RCH Consolidation Corner blog, Tom Hawkins examines the phenomenon of ‘unresponsive’ participants, which he defines as participants “for whom a plan has correct contact information, but who fail to respond to plan communications.” This sub-set of missing participants presents plan sponsors with unique challenges, because “the challenge is not finding them – it’s engaging them.” Hawkins continues by identifying six major drivers of unresponsive participants, while offering plan sponsors six best practices to minimize them.
Three Steps to Getting Off the Uncashed Distribution Check Treadmill
If you’re a defined contribution plan sponsor struggling with uncashed distribution checks, it can feel you’re on a never-ending treadmill. However, there are effective strategies that can greatly reduce the time, cost and risks associated with uncashed checks. Writing in the RCH Consolidation Corner blog, Tom Hawkins outlines three key steps to getting off the treadmill, including 1) a proactive program of locating missing participants, 2) eliminating the automatic cashout of sub-$1,000 balances and 2) utilizing safe harbor IRAs to resolve stale-dated checks.
Measuring the Value of Intensive Missing Participant Searches
Inevitably, situations arise when plan sponsors must perform more intensive missing participant searches, where additional search resources are applied to improve the quality of the search, over and above what an e-Search can deliver. More-intensive missing participant searches can increase the quality of search results, but by how much? As it turns out, quite a bit. RCH’s Tom Hawkins examines almost 7,000 intensive searches and identifies significant improvements in search quality that can result.
Six Steps to a Strong Missing Participant Policy
Having a documented missing participant policy is about fulfilling a plan sponsor’s fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of plan participants, and to ensure that they receive benefits they are owed. It not only guides a plan sponsor’s actions, but it can also signal to regulatory agencies that a sponsor is serious about undertaking reasonable efforts to identify and locate missing participants. Writing in the Consolidation Corner blog, RCH’s Tom Hawkins provides readers with six steps that are useful for building a strong missing participant policy, and in establishing the framework that guides efforts to locate participants.
A More-Enlightened Approach to Uncashed Distribution Checks
No retirement plan sponsor likes the idea of dealing with uncashed distribution checks, nor do they wish to draw unwanted regulatory attention or to become embroiled in costly litigation. Unfortunately, many plan sponsors place themselves in precisely that spot, becoming unnecessarily over-burdened with unresolved uncashed checks, while inviting unwanted regulatory scrutiny and/or legal challenges by having flawed uncashed check policies. In his 2/8/24 article in RCH's Consolidation Corner blog, Tom Hawkins lays out a "more-enlightened" approach to the problem of uncashed distribution checks, seeking to minimize their numbers, while simultaneously steering clear of the “red flags” that could land them in hot water.
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