Congress made pooled employer plans possible in the SECURE Act without settling how they fit the securities laws. The “single trust” exemptions that keep benefit plans from registering with the SEC read like they were written for one employer at a time, because they were. A new Carlton Fields explainer walks through the SEC staff statement from May that addressed the mismatch: the staff will not object if a PEP treats itself as a single-employer plan for those exemptions. The practical payoff concerns collective investment trusts. The staff also described how CITs can accept PEPs covering self-employed participants under Rule 180, and the required financial sophistication can be assessed at the pooled plan provider level. The statement does not change the law, but it gives providers a clearer route to offering lower-cost CITs alongside mutual funds.

Saving for retirement and spending in retirement are different skills. Vanguard's new “Beyond RMDs” research, the first installment of its How America Retires 2026 series, surveyed nearly 1,500 clients between 60 and 80 with $100,000 to $1 million saved, and only 8 percent took regular withdrawals to cover everyday spending. More than half made irregular withdrawals for specific purposes, and 39 percent were waiting for required minimum distributions to force the issue. Among respondents who had not tapped their retirement accounts, nearly half were covering their living expenses solely with Social Security. The misunderstandings are specific: of those planning to take only RMDs, 29 percent thought the minimums were the government's recommendation for a safe withdrawal amount, and 15 percent did not realize they could take more. Vanguard's modeling says a hypothetical retiree with $360,000 could draw about $17,000 a year on top of Social Security. The report's own summary: “The American retirement system has succeeded in helping workers build wealth. The next frontier is helping retirees use it.”

The follow-up to IFEBP's earlier walk-through of the proposed Trump-account contribution rules, this one on the testing, all of it still proposed. An employer contribution program could not favor highly compensated employees in contributions or benefits, and would need reasonable, objective eligibility classifications. The heart is an average benefits test: the average benefit going to non-highly compensated employees must be at least 55 percent of the average going to the highly compensated, counting only employees who actually receive something and, where benefits run through salary reduction, permitting workers earning under $25,000 to be disregarded. Certain employees, including those under 21 or with less than a year of service, can be left out of the testing populations, and collectively bargained employees may be excludable subject to conditions. Comments are due September 25, a hearing follows October 15, and the proposal would let employers correct specified 2026 testing failures until January 31, 2027.

Pretax 403(b) deferrals are excluded from current federal taxable income, but state and local rules can differ, and deferrals may be taxed at contribution in some jurisdictions. Groom Law Group's experts and CAPTRUST's Michael Webb treat the question as a reminder to check the applicable jurisdiction before telling a participant that a contribution is excluded from taxable wages.

Four practitioners answer one question and produce a workable audit checklist for health plan governance. The starting recognition: overseeing an ERISA health plan is not simply an HR function, and health plan oversight can carry fiduciary responsibilities for the people performing it, including HR staff. From there the advice gets concrete. Adopt a written committee charter and train the members. Read the plan's contracts and know how every service provider is paid. Make vendor oversight continuous, from compensation disclosures and gag clause review to periodic RFPs, and reframe the standard from “are we happy with our vendor” to “can we demonstrate that retaining this vendor is a prudent decision.” Get claims and pharmacy data and act on it. Keep a compliance calendar spanning the Form 5500, gag clause attestations, RxDC reporting and parity. Prudence is largely about process: keep a record of the information considered and the reasons for the decision.

The number anchoring the trend, per KFF's 2025 employer health benefits survey: 18 percent of employers with 5,000 or more employees had direct contracts with hospitals or health systems in 2025, up from 9 percent in 2019. In EBN's Q&A, Frier Levitt's Arielle Miliambro identifies potential savings in areas such as musculoskeletal care, oncology and cardiology, and discusses approaches including bundled payments and direct primary care. The draw is control. Contracting directly can give the employer more say over payment terms, the ability to tie reimbursement to outcomes, and access to claims-level data, with the contract determining what it actually gets. The obstacles get equal time, from legal and actuarial infrastructure most employers lack to provider systems with little incentive to deal where they dominate. Her starting advice is the practical part: identify the conditions, procedures and locations driving your costs. Without that information, it is hard to know what to negotiate.

Segal urges health plan fiduciaries to include vendors' use of AI in their oversight, warning about the risks of deploying tools without adequate review or participant protections. Its read on the technology is sober. The most consistent measurable benefits so far are administrative, while generative chatbots, the most visible use, have been shown to enable harmful behaviors in vulnerable users, against what Segal calls the lack of a clear regulatory framework for AI tools in mental health. The practical takeaway is four steps: audit vendors' use of AI, require clear disclosure of participant-facing AI, adopt ongoing governance practices, and verify the safety guardrails. A fuller version with a risk table by AI type and questions to put to vendors runs in this quarter's Benefits Quarterly.

The rest of the order behind today's First Thing. Charter also argued that employees had to use the plan's internal claims process before suing, and that the alleged harm to the plan was too abstract to give them standing. The court disagreed on both. The individual plan administrators are out of the case for now, because the complaint never said what each of them personally did, but the door is open to add them back with more detail.

Roughly 15,000 current and former NCR Savings Plan participants can proceed together in their recordkeeping-fee lawsuit. Judge Jones certified the class on September 10, covering the fees the plan paid between February 2017 and January 2024, which the suit says were far higher than a plan that size should pay. NCR had every new hire sign a class action waiver starting in 2018, and it did not stop certification. Recovery on these claims would go to the plan, and the court held the waiver unenforceable as a prospective waiver of the statutory right to sue on the plan's behalf. The Ninth and Eleventh Circuits reached the same result last year. Whether the fees were excessive is still to be decided.

The retirement money was supposedly in a “Mercury” account. According to the Department of Labor's complaint, the account did not exist. The suit, filed September 14, says that after participants began asking where their money was, WLPEO LLC chief executive Alan Kane, who is also the plan's trustee, told his co-chief executive it sat in that account, which only he could access, and months later admitted there was no such account. DOL alleges the company withheld $35,633 from employee paychecks between July 2023 and April 2024, then used the money for business expenses instead of depositing it in the plan. Colorado's Secretary of State has listed the company as delinquent since 2022. DOL is seeking more than repayment and lost earnings. It wants Kane removed as trustee, barred from ever serving as an ERISA fiduciary again, and replaced by an independent fiduciary at the defendants' expense.

The update counts twelve pension risk transfer suits filed in 2024, one in 2025, and none so far in 2026: thirteen cases consolidated into ten, six dismissed, three surviving motions to dismiss, one of those only by a magistrate judge's recommendation not yet adopted, and one awaiting a ruling. Its two new developments cut in opposite directions. In Dow v. Lumen Technologies, the District of Colorado dismissed on September 1 for lack of standing, applying Thole v. U.S. Bank the way most courts have: participants who have received every promised dollar cannot show actual or imminent harm from the Athene annuity swap. In Piercy v. AT&T, a Massachusetts magistrate judge recommended on August 31 allowing the amended complaint to proceed against the independent fiduciary that selected Athene, writing that the standing analysis in Thole “has little direct bearing on PRT cases.” Related standing questions are now before appellate courts in the Lockheed Martin and Bristol-Myers Squibb cases, where the Department of Labor and a state coalition have filed in support of the sponsors.