Defined contribution plan

The IRS released a new withholding form on January 4, 2022: Form W-4R, Withholding Certificate for Nonperiodic Payments and Eligible Rollover Distributions. The IRS also issued a revised Form W-4P, Withholding Certificate for Pension or Annuity Payments. As a result, payers and individuals will have a new process for calculating and electing federal income tax withholding on retirement distributions. Although the IRS will not require payers to use the new and revised forms until January 1, 2023, payers may start using them in 2022.

December 28, 2021 – The Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) has issued a notice with final forms revisions for Form 5500, Annual Return/Report of Employee Benefit Plan, and Form 5500-SF, Annual Return/Report of Small Employee Benefit Plan, relating to annual reporting changes for multiple-employer plans (MEPs) and pooled employer plans (PEPs). It specifically revises the Form 5500 and Form 5500-SF instructions for the 2021 reporting year for multiple-employer plans. It is effective for plan years beginning on or after January 1, 2021.

Plan participants have more time to roll over certain plan loan offsets under the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA). These are known as qualified plan loan offsets (QPLOs). In response to this legislative change, the IRS released proposed regulations in August 2020. The IRS finalized the regulations in December 2020, with only one modification: the applicability date.

At the end of 2019, the President signed the most comprehensive retirement reform package in over a decade: the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act. The SECURE Act is one of multiple bills that were included in the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020 (FCAA).

For the past three years, Congress has attempted to pass major retirement reform legislation. It has finally succeeded with the year-end passage of two spending packages meant to avert a government shutdown. One of the packages, the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020 (FCAA), includes multiple bills—including the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act, which contains several major retirement-related provisions. These provisions are nearly identical to those included in an earlier version of the SECURE Act that was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in May 2019. At the time of this publication, the President had not yet signed these bills into law. But it is widely anticipated that he will.