The question plan sponsors have been asking, answered from the source. Discretionary SECURE and SECURE 2.0 amendments, the features a plan chose to adopt, must be adopted by December 31, 2026, the Notice 2024-2 deadline, now about three and a half months away. Required amendments run on a different clock: generally the end of the second calendar year after the provision lands on the IRS's annual Required Amendments List. Collectively bargained plans, governmental plans and public-school 403(b) plans get later dates. The article also previews what will land on future Required Amendments Lists, including final rules on automatic enrollment, long-term part-time employees and required minimum distributions, each carrying its own two-year amendment window. The task between now and year-end is sorting every adopted feature into the right column.

The Field Assistance Bulletin got the headlines last week; this page is the working document. EBSA has posted a plain-language catalog of the warning signs it looks for in mental health parity investigations, organized around the three treatment restrictions the Department said on September 8 it will focus on: separate treatment limitations including exclusions, medical-necessity standards and review processes, and network adequacy. The page flags problem language in plan documents and problem patterns in operations, gives fiduciaries questions for selecting and monitoring service providers, and describes seven examples of voluntary fixes following DOL investigations. Two examples of what draws attention: a plan that excludes addiction-treatment medications such as methadone, naltrexone or buprenorphine while covering comparable medications for medical conditions, and a plan requiring burdensome manual paperwork to approve mental health treatment while running automated approvals for medical care. It closes with advice for plans facing a DOL review, starting with having the comparative analyses ready. Our thanks to the reader who sent along Aon's client bulletin flagging the page; Foley's compliance-traps alert covers the same ground from the plan sponsor's chair.

Independent dispute resolution, the federal process for resolving surprise-billing payment disputes between plans and providers, is getting a new front door. CMS's IDR Gateway page lays out the transition: account creation is open now, the full move comes late this year, and the current web forms stop working January 15, 2027, with one narrow resubmission exception. Anyone who processes disputes, represents parties or submits IDR forms must enroll and complete identity verification, only U.S.-based users may access the system, and where a third-party administrator handles disputes it is the administrator that registers. Bracewell's client alert reads the payer-registration requirement as good news for providers, who will finally know who they are negotiating with, and predicts the accompanying response requirement should keep more disputes from escalating to full arbitration, while cautioning that the portal does nothing about the process's biggest unsolved problem, collecting payment after a determination. Plans and their administrators should sort out who will register and handle disputes before the old forms shut off.

New Treasury guidance addresses the Saver's Match, retirement-plan rollovers and employer contributions to Trump Accounts.

SECURE 2.0 lets employers match an employee's student loan payments as if they were 401(k) deferrals, and EBRI's new 23-page issue brief estimates who could benefit and by how much. About one in five 401(k) participants aged 25 to 69 carried student debt between 2019 and 2023. Debt holders participate less often, 75.5 percent versus 84.1 percent, and hold less: median balances run 18.5 percent lower, with the gap widest, 45 percent, among participants in their 40s. If every plan adopted the feature, EBRI projects $11.2 billion a year in additional matching contributions at a 4 percent match cap and $20.2 billion at 6 percent. Candidly, a student-debt benefits vendor, helped fund the research. Trade coverage from PLANSPONSOR and 401(k) Specialist focused on the adoption math.

August was a quiet net positive for the 100 largest corporate pension plans: Milliman's index puts the aggregate funded ratio at 112.2 percent at month-end, up from 112.1 percent in July, with the funded surplus growing $3 billion as a 0.92 percent investment return outweighed a small decline in discount rates. For plans weighing termination or risk transfer, the arithmetic keeps cooperating.

Weight-loss drugs are the single largest contributor to the record increase in employer health-insurance costs expected next year, the Post reports, and the retreat has begun. PepsiCo stopped covering the drugs for non-diabetic employees; Cigna dropped them for its own workforce. In a Business Group on Health survey, two-thirds of companies still cover weight-loss drugs but 10 percent plan to stop in 2027, and a separate Marsh analysis finds 27 percent adding restrictions such as minimum BMI thresholds or a sleep apnea or cardiac diagnosis. Fully insured employers may not get a choice at all if carriers refuse to price the coverage. For workers, the difference between employers is personal: one worker now pays $450 a month for Zepbound, eating up more than a third of the $15,000 raise she received when she switched to a job that did not cover the drug. EBN's companion piece cites an estimate from digital weight-loss clinic Embla Health that employers pay $600 to $900 a month after rebates for each person taking the drugs, and actuary Amanda Turcotte offers a practical caution: supporting treatment does not have to mean paying every dollar, but switching coverage on and off each year risks hurting employees' health and morale.

What can a smaller employer do when traditional health insurance gets too expensive? Foley walks through the alternatives: level-funded plans and captives, which self-fund claims with insurance protection against large losses; association plans and professional employer organizations, which band employers together; and ICHRAs and QSEHRAs, accounts that help employees buy their own coverage. Other approaches change where employees receive care or how providers and pharmacies get paid, from narrow networks and virtual-first designs to direct primary care and GLP-1-specific reimbursement accounts. There are plenty of choices but no universal bargain: each option trades premium savings for financial risk, administrative work and compliance obligations the employer takes on.

Companies increasingly want contractors and other nonemployees, the rideshare driver, the influencer, the brand ambassador, to hold equity, and Foley's walk-through shows why that is harder than it sounds. The securities exemptions companies rely on for compensatory grants, Rule 701 and Form S-8, cover employees, directors and a narrow band of consultants, and a gig worker or Instagram influencer “may not fit neatly into any of those boxes.” The SEC proposed extending Rule 701 to platform workers in 2020, but the proposal was never finalized and cannot be relied on, and it never reached influencers on third-party platforms at all. On the tax side, incentive stock options are unavailable to non-employees, there is no withholding, and 409A pricing discipline still applies. The practical advice: confirm the recipient actually qualifies under existing exemptions, document the compensation arrangement in writing, tie vesting to completed work, and specify when the company can recover the award.

The order behind today's First Thing draws the line that matters in these cases. The court distinguished decisions involving plans that gave fiduciaries a choice about how to use forfeitures; Liberty Mutual's plan required the money to go toward company contributions, so there was no fiduciary choice to attack. The court also rejected the two theories that recur across these cases: the forfeitures never stopped being plan assets, so nothing flowed out of the plan to the employer, and moving money between uses inside a plan is not the kind of insider bargain the prohibited-transaction rules police. Any benefit to Liberty Mutual from lower future contributions was incidental. An amended complaint is due in 21 days, no new defendants or claims, with a redline showing every change.

The rest of the opinion behind today's Second Thing. IAC argued in the alternative that the award had to fall because the Fund used inconsistent rates for withdrawal liability and minimum funding. On that point IAC lost: the opinion collects the decisions since the Supreme Court's Concrete Pipe case holding the two rates must be similar, though not necessarily identical. The court also read this year's M&K Employee Solutions decision as support rather than obstacle, noting the Supreme Court's warning about actuaries adopting intentionally low discount rates for withdrawal liability while using higher rates for other purposes. Judgment entered September 15; the recalculation goes back to the arbitrator.

Siobhan Haldeman's lawyer asked Mass General Brigham for the plan documents governing her long-term disability claim on September 18, 2024, and received them 230 days later, after this lawsuit was filed. Judge Burroughs ordered MGB to pay a $5,000 penalty under ERISA's document-request provision, which now authorizes up to $110 a day, describing the award as a middle route between precedents. MGB's defense was that Haldeman's counsel already had the documents from representing other participants. The court's answer: “MGB never told Haldeman's counsel that she already possessed the Plan Documents; to the contrary, it repeatedly promised to promptly deliver the Plan Documents, then failed to do so.” Being deprived of plan terms while preparing an appeal is inherently prejudicial, the court held. Haldeman is entitled to attorney fees, with the amount to be set after a fee motion due in fourteen days. The plan itself escaped liability on an important distinction: the penalty applies to the administrator, not the plan. Roberts Disability Law's same-day commentary reads the case from the claimant side.

No case of the week this week; as the editors put it, the federal courts “finally took a breather.” The nugget that stopped us comes from Gail W.-S. v. United Healthcare, a District of Utah residential mental health treatment case. Per YEW's write-up, Judge Shelby awarded about $61,700 in fees at $600 an hour, plus roughly $88,500 in prejudgment interest at Utah's 10 percent statutory rate on about $103,000 in benefits. The interest nearly matches the benefit, and the court observed that “the insurance industry appears to need a strong push.” Also noted: a QDRO, the domestic-relations order that divides retirement benefits at divorce, submitted nine years late arrived too late to move a survivor annuity that had already vested in a second spouse (Gray v. DTE), and the Eastern District of New York joined the Second Circuit line holding a power of attorney cannot give an out-of-network provider standing to sue (Karkare v. Estee Lauder).

Arkansas has required pharmacy benefit managers to reimburse pharmacies at least the national average acquisition cost of a drug since 2015; a law passed last year finally gave pharmacies the right to sue over violations, with statutory damages up to $10,000 per violation. Twelve independent Arkansas pharmacies have now become the first to use it, filing in Missouri state court, Express Scripts' home turf. They say they documented about 48,300 underpaid prescriptions between August 2025 and March 2026, likely an undercount given their limited view into claims data, and the complaint does not mince words: “Express Scripts' failure to comply with Arkansas law is not a technological challenge; it is a business decision.” Express Scripts says it pays competitive rates and will defend itself. One to watch for plan sponsors as states keep building private enforcement mechanisms against PBMs.