Field Assistance Bulletin 2026-03, addressed by Assistant Secretary Daniel Aronowitz to the agency's enforcement staff, sets out how EBSA will enforce the mental health parity law's nonquantitative treatment limitation requirements while the 2024 final rule remains in nonenforcement status. The bulletin identifies three priority areas. Blanket exclusions applied only to mental health and substance use disorder benefits, medical necessity standards including prior authorization and concurrent and retrospective review, and network adequacy with attention to provider admission standards and reimbursement methodologies. Proprietary clinical guidelines may be used but must be produced on request to investigators and participants.

The companion to the enforcement bulletin, and the piece plan sponsors will actually use. The page catalogs the red flags EBSA associates with parity problems in written plan terms, among them exclusions that apply only to mental health and substance use disorder benefits, age limits without medical comparators, stricter medical necessity criteria, and disproportionate prior authorization requirements. It then lists the operational patterns that draw attention even when the documents look clean, such as slower authorization timelines for mental health claims, manual processing where medical claims run automated, thinner network recruitment, and higher out of network utilization. A closing set of monitoring practices pairs each of the bulletin's three focus areas with side by side comparisons a plan can run now.

Advisory Opinion 2026-02A, the agency's first since May, addresses a health trust sponsored by an association of NAPA auto parts stores and repair centers covering more than 3,500 employees. EBSA concluded the participating employers could, at least in form, constitute a bona fide employer group under ERISA section 3(5), so the arrangement could be a single multiple employer plan. Whether the employers control the program in substance is an inherently factual question the opinion declines to decide. The letter confirms the trust is a MEWA and reserves judgment on fully insured status because the insurance contracts were not examined, while noting that nothing in the submission suggested the plan would fail that test if the insurer keeps first line responsibility for all claims. The opinion follows the path marked by Advisory Opinion 2024-02A for association coverage run through an employer controlled trust.

Employer contributions to Trump Accounts are excluded from income but count as wages for FICA and FUTA, a cost that FSA and HSA contributions do not carry. A contribution program may not steer money to a preferred trustee, so payroll must accommodate whatever custodian each employee's dependent uses, and contributions are reported on the W-2 under a new code. On the dependent care side, the average benefits test counts only participating employees in the denominator, relief for sponsors who kept failing the test with every eligible employee counted, and a failing program can preserve favorable treatment for everyone else by moving only the excess benefits into highly compensated employees' income by the W-2 deadline. Employers may rely on the proposal immediately.

The proposed prudence safe harbor would have fiduciaries read and critically review the documents behind common defined contribution investments, and the participant disclosure rules already require translating those terms so an average participant can understand them. Toth argues both duties quietly assume the documents are readable, a standard that has never applied to collective investment trust participation agreements or group annuity contracts, and that layered products can stack terms on terms until they become nearly unmanageable. With more than 10 trillion dollars in 401(k) assets, he writes, the old assumption that plans are sophisticated investors who need no readable documents will simply fail, and once the rule is final the burden of fixing it belongs to the product developers.

The twentieth installment of Reish's series on the DOL's alternative assets proposal reaches the hardest benchmarking case, an asset allocation fund holding private equity alongside public securities. The proposal expects a meaningful benchmark that blends broad market indices for the traditional sleeve with the methodologies investment professionals actually use for the private sleeve, such as internal rate of return and public market equivalents. His warning lands on the same phrase Toth examines above. Fiduciaries who receive an adviser's benchmark recommendation must read, critically review, and understand it before adopting it as their own, because blind reliance will not support compliance. He notes the final rule could be out and effective in the first quarter of 2027.

A reader asked whether participants may demand all four quarterly statements on paper or only the single annual statement the newer rule guarantees. The Groom Law Group attorneys behind the Ask the Experts column answer that the 2002 right never went away. A participant may request a paper copy of any document furnished electronically, quarterly statements included, no matter which e-delivery safe harbor the plan uses, so sponsors need a process for tracking and honoring those requests.

A vendor guide, but a usefully concrete one. The conversion timeline runs 60 to 120 days, termination notices to the incumbent often require 90 days, and the blackout notice must go out 30 to 60 days before participants lose access, with penalties of up to $173 per day per participant for missing the deadline. The guide walks through what a mid-year switch splits between two providers, why January 1 conversions run cleaner, and which charges hide in investment expense ratios rather than invoices, and it reminds sponsors that the blackout notice duty stays with the employer no matter who prepares the paperwork.

Segal walks through the federal IDR overhaul's next two operational steps under the No Surprises Act. Registration for the IDR Gateway, the centralized platform replacing one-off web forms, opens September 15, and sponsors who rely on a TPA need no account of their own but should confirm the TPA has registered. New batching rules take effect November 1. Up to 50 items or services may travel in one dispute if furnished within the same 30 business day window and tied to a single patient encounter or the same or comparable service code, and a batched determination now triggers a 30 business day cooling off period before the initiating party may open a new dispute over the same item or service.

Robert Andrews, the former congressman who leads the Health Transformation Alliance, tells EBN the question for employers is not how much they spent but what they got for the money. With nearly all employers covering GLP-1s for diabetes, the hard decision is obesity coverage for patients who are not diabetic, and Andrews describes a turn toward clinically driven coverage decisions built on claims and health record data, watching whether weight stays off and A1C improves. Before cutting benefits, he argues, employers should chase the waste first, the billing errors, ineligible claims, and payments that should never have gone out the door.

A class action against Philips North America over its $5.7 billion 401(k) plan survived dismissal in full last Thursday, in a ruling that touches both of the season's litigation waves at once. The prudence claim alleges the plan held onto a Prudential stable value fund while comparable guaranteed investment contracts outperformed it by an average of more than 40%, and the court held that First Circuit precedent protecting conservative investments did not control because the complaint identified specific steps the committee never took, requesting proposals from providers and negotiating the crediting rate. Whether the comparators are meaningful is a question of fact for discovery. The forfeiture claim survived on the loyalty theory. The court acknowledged the majority rule that steering forfeitures to reduce company contributions does not breach the duty of loyalty, then reasoned that a fiduciary who always exercises that discretion for the employer and never for participants, without ever investigating the alternative, may plausibly have acted out of self interest. The same theory survived in the Penn State Health case covered yesterday and failed for good in Lithia Motors.

The Russelectric ESOP case that produced May's 76-page trial decision reached its endgame in papers filed last Wednesday. The certified class of 394 participants asked the court to preliminarily approve a $5.55 million settlement with John, Suzanne, and Lisa Russell, reached through a JAMS mediator after the court issued its trial ruling but before it fixed damages on the claims plaintiffs won, the discretionary bonuses paid out around the ESOP's termination and the knowing benefit claims against the family. Class members receive shares proportional to their stakes in the ESOP, nothing reverts to the defendants, and counsel will seek a third of the fund plus $25,000 service awards for the four named plaintiffs who carried the case through a bench trial. A companion motion consolidates administration with the settlements reached by the case's other defendants, and an independent fiduciary will review the deal before the fairness hearing.

The first firm analysis of the suit 22 multiemployer plans filed against the PBGC last week adds the numbers that show what the waitlist costs. The plans represent more than 25,000 participants and estimate they are owed roughly $450 million. Eight are already insolvent and have cut benefits, in some cases by more than half, and three more expect insolvency within a year. Many of the affected retirees are past 75, and because special financial assistance restores benefits only to participants alive when the money arrives, delay does damage no later payment can repair. Jackson Lewis also notes what tilts the eligibility fight. The Supreme Court denied review of the Second Circuit's Bakery Drivers decision in May, yet the complaint alleges the agency still bars terminated plans outside that circuit while letting terminated plans inside it move ahead in the queue.

Trucker Huss surveys the wave. More than two dozen class actions since the start of 2025 challenge the selection and monitoring of stable value funds, most built on crediting rate comparisons against competitor products and an invitation to infer a flawed process from performance alone. The firm maps the meaningful benchmark pleading standard circuit by circuit, with the Sixth Circuit's Parker-Hannifin decision as the outlier that lets context allegations substitute for comparators, and notes the whole question reaches the Supreme Court in Anderson v. Intel, set for argument October 6. Five practical steps close it out, from understanding who bears credit risk under the wrap contract to documenting the deliberate trade of yield for protection. The Philips ruling above is the wave's newest survivor.

Saul Ewing's monthly roundup runs procedural this time, and usefully so. A California court kept a long COVID disability case in the plaintiff's chosen district even though she lived, and most of her doctors practiced, in another one, deference that carries extra weight in ERISA cases. A Florida plaintiff won leave to dismiss and refile elsewhere after seventeen months of litigation, on condition she pay the insurer's costs. A Minnesota court refused to let defendants swap in a new rationale for a denial once litigation began. An Illinois court rejected a claimant's oral testimony that he mailed a timely appeal, drawing a negative inference from his failure to produce the letters themselves. And a South Carolina court held an eighteen day review was enough where the denial turned on eligibility rather than disability.

Greenberg Traurig recaps New York City's amended safe and sick leave rules, under city guidance issued July 23 following February's legislative changes. Employers must front load 32 hours of unpaid leave for nearly all employees, provide 20 hours of paid prenatal leave running on 52 week cycles rather than calendar years, and keep substantially expanded records, including prior policy versions and per pay period balance tracking. Penalties start at $500 per employee per instance and escalate from there.

Timed to counter the recurring claim that 401(k) tax benefits flow mostly to the wealthy, the American Retirement Association's Hidden in Plain Sight study finds workers earning between $50,000 and $100,000 pay 9.1% of federal income taxes and collect more than 30% of retirement tax benefits once employer contributions are counted, while households above $200,000 pay 71.4% of the taxes and receive 16.7% of the benefits. ARA chief Brian Graff argues working class Americans get the lion's share, a case built for the Saver's Match era arriving in 2027.

Fidelity's survey of 1,311 plan sponsors finds 41% now want their adviser to hold full discretion over the investment menu, up from 36% last year, and 89% plan to add investment options within a year. Half are weighing a replacement of their target date funds, with versions carrying embedded annuities or stable value drawing the most interest, and the help sponsors most want from advisers is on legislative and fiduciary issues.

Why did public pension plans take alternatives from 14% to 39% of their risky assets over two decades? The Center for Retirement Research finds the driver was belief rather than desperation. Consultant recommendations and peer behavior explain the shift, funding status and return targets barely register, and a 10 point rise in neighboring plans' alternative allocations predicts a 7.2 point rise in a plan's own.

WTW's Thinking Ahead Institute counts $27.7 trillion in the world's 300 largest retirement funds after 13.4% growth in 2025, the fastest pace since 2017, with defined contribution assets growing 15.8% against 9.4% for defined benefit. The report's warning lands close to home for US sponsors. The weakness appears at retirement, when institutional support falls away and individuals face fragmented markets on their own.