The Commission proposes rescinding the 2010 pay-to-play rule, Advisers Act Rule 206(4)-5, which bars advisers from providing compensated advisory services to government clients for two years after covered political contributions. Chairman Atkins calls the rule overly prescriptive and would leave political contribution policing to state and local law. Comments run for 60 days after Federal Register publication, and advisers to public retirement plans are the audience most directly affected.

The premise is simple—automation does not transfer liability. The guide works through six exposure points: AI generated participant communications that still must satisfy disclosure rules, claims administration where a vendor's biased or inadequate algorithm becomes the hiring fiduciary's problem, investment menu tools that should supplement rather than replace a live 3(21) or 3(38), committee minutes that come out either dangerously verbatim or uselessly sparse, confidentiality and HIPAA risk when nonpublic data reaches AI features, and service agreements that should name AI uses, testing, and approval rights.

The alert turns the proposed regulations into an employer decision memo. Contributions of up to $2,500 per employee per year can flow either directly or through a cafeteria plan, income tax free but payroll taxable, and only common law employees may participate, leaving out partners and 2 percent S corporation shareholders. The program needs a written plan, DCAP style nondiscrimination testing, trustee verification of accounts rather than employee certification, and identification of contributions within 21 days.

The fifty state scorecard answers the question employers will get from employees: whether their state will tax these accounts the way the federal code does. Nine states have no income tax, twenty plus the District broadly conform, ten more have said they will conform or passed legislation, and California, Hawaii, and Kentucky reversed earlier positions and will now follow federal law. Four holdouts remain—Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wisconsin—where earnings would face annual state tax despite federal deferral. The list is still moving, and the safest answer remains checking with the state tax office.

Wilshire's Todd Cassler says product development has outrun implementation, and names four bottlenecks: liquidity management, valuation for infrequently traded assets, recordkeeping built for daily valued funds, and committee governance that can document why private markets belong at all. He is candid about the adviser education gap, and poses a useful alignment test—whether asset managers pitching private markets offer them in their own employees' plans.

Aon's compliance and policy consulting team reads the FAQs against the tobacco surcharge litigation that produced them. The sharpest points come in the comments—that the 2013 preamble suggested retroactive rewards while the regulatory text never clearly imposed them, and that the enforcement position may reduce regulatory audit risk but does not eliminate litigation risk, since some courts have already agreed with retroactive full reward claims. A closing caution tells plans not to read the disclosure clarification as a reason to drop model reasonable alternative standard language from participant materials.

A walk through the late August FAQs confirming that a plan does not owe a tobacco surcharge refund back to the start of the plan year when a participant meets a reasonable alternative standard midyear. The Departments concede the 2013 regulatory text never clearly required retroactive application and promise no enforcement action against plans that pay the reward prospectively, while stopping short of amending the rule itself.

Bass Berry focuses on where the relief runs out. The FAQs bless prospective-only rewards and confirm that a passing reference to a wellness program in a benefits summary does not trigger the full disclosure obligation, but the forbearance binds only the agencies. Disclosure failures, fiduciary breaches, and plan design defects remain open theories for private plaintiffs.

The angle here is the notice mechanics. The reasonable alternative standard disclosure belongs in every plan material that describes a health contingent program's terms, and for outcome based programs it must also appear in the communication telling an individual they failed the initial standard. A summary of benefits that merely notes cost sharing can vary with wellness participation does not trigger the duty. The piece also stresses that the relief is temporary, pending future guidance.

The summary aims at HR execution. Beyond the headline relief on retroactive rewards, it restates the ground rules: outcome based programs need a reasonable alternative standard, rewards cap at 30 percent of employee only cost with 50 percent for tobacco programs, and materials describing the program must disclose the alternative and the physician accommodation. It closes with three action items—confirm the tax treatment of rewards, evaluate whether the program actually works, and train HR staff to handle alternative standard requests.

Seyfarth finds the practical wins in the proposed Section 129 regulations. The average benefits test now counts only employees who actually receive DCAP benefits, which should make the 55 percent threshold easier to satisfy, and salary reduction arrangements may disregard employees earning under $25,000. A new correction mechanism lets an employer cure a failed average benefits or owner concentration test by moving the excess into affected individuals' W-2 income, preserving tax favored treatment for everyone else. Comments close September 25 with an October 15 hearing, and employers may rely on the proposal now.

The 2026 Aegis Risk survey of 1,378 plan sponsors covering 1.4 million employees finds stop-loss renewal increases running from 13.6 percent at a $100,000 deductible to 15.9 percent at $750,000, roughly five points above last year's increases. The survey attributes the correction to late 2024 claim severity and leveraged trend against unchanged deductibles, and sees no easing in the 2027 cycle.

Representative Frank Pallone sent oversight letters to six IDR entities—C2C Innovative Solutions, Commence, Dane Street, EdiPhy Advisors, National Medical Reviews, and ProPeer Resources—with responses due September 24. He wants to know how they decide disputes, how often they rule claims ineligible, how frequently providers win, and how their decision makers are paid. The context is stark: a system built for 17,000 cases a year took in 2.5 million disputes in 2025, Georgetown research puts the added spending at $22 billion over four years, and two of the six rule for providers more than 90 percent of the time.

The tri-agencies announced a recertification process for the IDR entities that decide No Surprises Act disputes, testing rationale quality, capacity to keep up with volume, and conflicts of interest, with each entity's renewal subject to a five day public petition window in which plans and employers can object. An entity that fails to renew must refund fees on its pending disputes. One framing data point: a median in network rate of $86 for an hour of hospital observation time against a median IDR award of $19,985 for the same hour.

Lockton's third quarter market update names four pressures keeping costs elevated: expensive medications, accumulating high cost claims, chronic condition management, and rising utilization. On the pharmacy side it calls out double digit brand drug price increases and growing GLP-1 spend. The update pairs a five step checklist for managing increases with a look at leave administration complexity.

Turquoise Health dashboard data for the second quarter of 2025 shows UnitedHealth winning 67.7 percent of the disputes it initiated, though that is 21 wins across just 31 claims. The fuller picture runs the other way, providers file the overwhelming majority of disputes and win at roughly 80 percent, with one provider side firm resolving 341,866 claims at an 88.4 percent success rate.

Written for self insured organizations, large deductible programs, and captives, the point is that a reserve increase is not by itself bad news. Three complementary diagnostics—actual versus expected development, a reserve walk between evaluation dates, and frequency and severity analysis—turn the periodic reserve review into a tool for spotting emerging trends and supporting funding decisions.

The sources converge on one design principle—keep a human in the loop and make access to a counselor a standing choice rather than an escalation. Gallagher's Robby White urges advisers to steer employers toward communications, decision support, and navigation first, inside a governance framework that is transparent about what data the tools use. Collective Health's Ali Diab says autonomous agents making healthcare decisions are not here yet, though the direction is set.

Chief Judge Jarbou dismissed every claim in the amended complaint. The headline holding voided the Labor Department's physician accommodation disclosure regulation as applied—because the rules themselves treat a tobacco cessation program as requiring no health related accommodation, requiring Meijer to notify participants of an accommodation it need not offer was an unreasonable reading of the statute after Loper Bright. The opinion also rejected the theory that using surcharge collections to offset employer contributions breaches fiduciary duties—the duty is to deliver promised benefits, not to maximize plan assets, and higher premiums may injure employees without injuring the plan. The prohibited transaction claim fell to the Sixth Circuit's Holliday rule that an employer may do by discretion what it could have done by plan amendment.

The court enjoined enforcement of the Prescription Drug Affordability Act's reporting requirements against PCMA members serving ERISA covered plans, finding the claim by claim disclosure mandates—drug lists, dosage units, out of pocket spending, rebate passthroughs, copies of PBM contracts—most analogous to the Vermont database law preempted in Gobeille. Last month's Seventh Circuit decision in McClain did not save the statute, because the Illinois requirements are not incidental to any fee or tax provision and reach far beyond one. Fines of $10,000 per day made the harm irreparable, relief runs association wide, and the first annual reports had been due the day after the order.

The court dismissed retirees' challenge to Lumen's 2021 transfer of $1.4 billion in pension obligations covering 22,600 participants to Athene, holding under Thole that participants whose fixed benefits keep arriving allege no Article III injury. Allegations that Athene is riskier than traditional insurers showed at most that it is more likely to fail than other providers, not that default is certainly impending, and four years of uninterrupted payments undercut any imminence. The opinion catalogs the district court split on pension risk transfer standing and notes no controlling authority anywhere. Dismissal was without prejudice, with an amicus brief from ERIC, the American Benefits Council, and CIEBA accepted along the way.

Ahead of the October 6 Supreme Court argument, the piece maps the circuit split on whether an ERISA plaintiff must plead a comparator fund similar in aims, risks, and strategies to the investment it challenges. By their count five circuits require the showing and two reject it, with the Eleventh Circuit's August reversal in Johnson v. Royal Caribbean the newest entry on the no side. The argument is that a benchmark should be necessary but never sufficient without allegations of a flawed process, and they tie the standard to a March Labor Department proposal folding the same concept into a fiduciary safe harbor.

A read of the settlement agreement and supporting declaration filed September 3 fills out the picture behind the $5.55 million Russell family settlement reported yesterday. All four settlements in the case, counting the earlier deals with Denise Wyatt, Dennis Long, and Argent Trust, total $14.55 million. The parties had stipulated that the plan's direct losses from the conduct on which the Russells were found liable came to $2,998,716.55, so the family's payment alone runs to nearly twice the stipulated direct loss. The agreement certifies a mandatory non-opt-out class of 394, funds in two equal installments tied to preliminary and final approval, lets class members elect tax-qualified rollovers, and sends any unclaimable residue to a nonprofit rather than back to the defendants. The release reaches the 2016 redemption transaction, the clawback agreement, and the Siemens sale proceeds.

A Proskauer team unpacks the Fifth Circuit's August 11 en banc ruling on how insurers calculate the qualifying payment amount that anchors No Surprises Act arbitration. The court excluded ghost rates, contracted rates for services a provider never actually furnishes, required inclusion of bonus and incentive payments, and preserved the exclusion of single case agreements. The practical effect is higher QPAs in dispute resolution, a benchmark shift that lands on self funded plans just as arbitration volume keeps climbing.

The Labor Department's Veterans' Employment and Training Service issued an opinion letter reading the 2025 amendment that added other retaliatory action to USERRA as aligning the statute with Title VII retaliation standards. The examples go well beyond firing, schedule changes, transfers to less desirable positions, increased scrutiny, exclusion from professional opportunities, and threats all qualify when they would dissuade a reasonable worker from asserting rights—agency guidance rather than a decided case.

The alert uses Ohio's Senate Bill 396, which would create a state paid family and medical leave insurance program, to restate the multi-state math. Fourteen states plus D.C. already run mandatory programs, Maryland contributions start in January 2027 with benefits in 2028, and obligations generally follow work location, so a single remote hire in a PFML state can pull an employer in. It also flags the recurring mistake: assuming an existing PTO policy satisfies a state program that actually works like unemployment insurance with its own contributions and notices.