PBGC expanded its merger FAQs for multiemployer plans that received special financial assistance, adding examples of the withdrawal liability modifications available to merged building and construction industry plans under its merger regulation. The headline modification lets a merged plan compute a withdrawing employer's share from its share of contributions rather than unfunded vested benefits, which keeps assessments closer to what the rescued plan would have produced on its own and helps show PBGC that a merger won't increase its risk of loss. The agency's worked examples show the stakes: in one scenario the default method zeroes out a $2.5 million assessment that the modification mostly preserves. The update landed the same day as the attrition-event reporting waiver we covered Monday, and the same week a Maryland decision below shows how much can turn on who bears withdrawal liability.

Several major benefits rules are awaiting White House review, the last stop before publication. EBSA's automatic portability exemption arrived September 14 as a final rule with a statutory deadline. Its PBM fee disclosure transparency rule has been there as a final since July 23. Treasury sent two Trump Accounts rulemakings on September 18, an interim final rule and a companion proposal under new section 530A. And Treasury's final rule on automatic enrollment under section 414A has been in review since June.

Two data points for the debate the comment file above was supposed to inform. CFA Institute modeled private equity, private debt, infrastructure, real estate, and venture capital inside target-date glide paths and reached a two-sided result: funds with private equity allocations generally produced higher average retirement balances, but a 10 percent allocation didn't materially change where a participant lands over a working career, and contribution rates and time in the plan mattered more than the allocation. “Opening access is not the same as improving retirement outcomes,” the institute's Olivier Fines said. Participants, meanwhile, sound willing: Invesco's summer survey of 517 large-plan participants found 58 percent view the higher-fee, higher-potential-return trade-off favorably and 65 percent would rather reach private markets through a target-date fund than pick the assets themselves.

Troutman walks employers through the piece of the Trump Accounts proposed regulations that's theirs to act on: the first framework for employer contribution programs under new Code section 128. We covered the proposal when it published August 11, and the detail worth repeating is the calendar: comments close this Friday, September 25, with a public hearing set for October 15.

Harold Ashner, who as PBGC's Assistant General Counsel for Legislation and Regulations from 1988 to 2005 drafted or supervised most of the agency's regulations, has published a practitioner's overview of distress and involuntary terminations in the Journal of Pension Planning & Compliance. Among the points sponsors of underfunded plans rarely hear: consult PBGC before filing, don't sign a termination agreement before the settlement is final, remember the agency wears separate guarantor and trustee hats in any settlement, and a consensual involuntary termination can sometimes bypass the full distress process.

EBRI has quantified SECURE 2.0's student loan match. If every plan sponsor adopted the optional feature, which treats an employee's student loan payments as elective deferrals for matching purposes, EBRI estimates $11.2 billion a year would flow to participants' accounts at a 4 percent match cap and $20.2 billion at 6 percent. The population is bigger than sponsors may assume: roughly 20 percent of 401(k) participants ages 25 to 69 carry student loan debt, including more than a third of those under 30. Among eligible workers ages 25 to 34, 75.5 percent of those with student debt participated, compared with 84.1 percent without it. Borrowers also had lower median balances across income and tenure groups, with the largest gap, about 45 percent, among participants in their 40s. For sponsors weighing the feature, the report offers a first sizing of who could benefit and by how much.

A California bill on the Governor's desk, AB 1609, would give health care customers a right to a human being. Businesses with more than $500 million in annual revenue serving California customers, including health plans, payers, managed care organizations, and PBMs, would have to disclose when a chatbot isn't a person, connect a customer who asks about a refill, a transfer, a denied claim, a prior authorization, or a specialist referral to a live agent within 15 minutes or offer an appointment within one business day, and cap cumulative phone holds at an hour. The bill asks for a good-faith effort, not a stopwatch guarantee. Licensed hospitals won a broad carve-out; plans and PBMs didn't. Penalties reach $10,000 per violation, effective January 1, 2027 if signed. Sponsors with California populations should ask vendors now how member-service AI would meet the clock.

An important reminder about the parity guidance we covered Monday: EBSA's narrowed enforcement focus doesn't shrink the comparative analysis itself. Employers must still maintain a complete NQTL analysis covering all nonquantitative treatment limits, because participants can demand the full document with 30 days to produce it, private plaintiffs don't follow the agency's priorities, and participant complaints can still trigger investigations of any category.

In International Painters and Allied Trades Industry Pension Fund v. Allegion Access Technologies, No. 1:25-cv-02624 (D. Md. Sept. 16, 2026), Judge Brendan A. Hurson dismissed an employer's attempt to pass about $1.9 million in partial withdrawal liability to the union that walked away. After employees voted to deauthorize the union, the union disclaimed the 21-member bargaining unit mid-contract with no advance notice, Allegion stopped contributing, and the fund assessed liability. Allegion sued the union for breach of contract, indemnification, and unjust enrichment, and lost on all three: a union may validly disclaim representation after a deauthorization election, the bargaining agreement contained no indemnification clause, and the contributions went to the fund, a separate entity. Allegion inherited these agreements when it bought the business from Stanley Black & Decker, and the employer couldn't shift the assessment to the union under these agreements. For buyers inheriting union contracts, that's a reason to examine who bears withdrawal liability before signing. The fund's own collection claim awaits a separate summary judgment ruling.

In Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Express Scripts, No. 25-5866 (6th Cir. Sept. 18, 2026), Chief Judge Sutton reversed a remand and kept Kentucky's opioid suit against Express Scripts and Optum in federal court under the federal officer removal statute. The PBMs negotiate formulary placement and rebates for federal employee, TRICARE, and veterans programs alongside their commercial book, and the court found “little to no daylight between their federal and non-federal conduct” because they conduct a single negotiation for all clients. Kentucky's attempt to disclaim the federal side of that indivisible conduct didn't work, a result the opinion counts five circuits reaching. Among the colorable federal defenses: ERISA preemption of claims aimed at how a PBM structures its standard formulary offerings. The decision concerns where Kentucky's lawsuit will proceed, not whether the PBMs are liable. But the structural fact that drove it, one negotiation serving federal and commercial plans alike, is the same feature at the center of the PBM transparency debates sponsors are living through.

In Raynes v. Arthur J. Gallagher (Illinois), LLC, No. 1:26-cv-11389 (N.D. Ill., filed Sept. 17, 2026), seven employees of the insurance brokerage bring a proposed class action alleging their employer sat on both sides of its own voluntary benefits program: as sponsor and fiduciary it selected the carriers for life, AD&D, disability, legal, and stop-loss coverages its workers bought with payroll deductions, and as broker it collected the commissions and administration fees built into those participant-paid premiums. Citing the plan's own Form 5500 filings, the complaint alleges $4.7 million in commissions and fees flowed to Gallagher affiliates from 2020 through 2024, and alleges prohibited self-dealing under section 406(b) and a breach of the duty of loyalty. These are allegations only, and Gallagher hasn't yet responded. Capozzi Adler represents the employees. For other sponsors, the case raises a straightforward question: who reviews and approves the broker's compensation inside your voluntary benefits program?

One appeal to watch on the forfeiture-reallocation theory is Clouse v. Northrop Grumman, No. 26-1258 (4th Cir.), from Judge Trenga's dismissal in the Eastern District of Virginia. The amicus brief the U.S. Chamber, American Benefits Council, and ERISA Industry Committee filed July 14 doubles as the wave's scoreboard: the groups count roughly 100 plan sponsors sued on the theory that using forfeited employer contributions to offset future contributions breaches fiduciary duties, and they argue that sixty years of Treasury authority, from the pre-ERISA regulation requiring pension forfeitures to reduce employer contributions through a 2023 proposed regulation blessing the same choice for defined contribution plans, plus ERISA section 514(d), forecloses it. That's the amici's argument, not yet any circuit's holding. Companion appeals are pending in the Fourth, Third, and Ninth Circuits, and the Labor Department has filed on the sponsor side in the Ninth.

Roberts Disability Law's summary of Doe v. The Signature Benefits Plan, the decision that led yesterday's Court section, adds a point our writeup didn't reach: the court reviewed the entire administrative record, including documents from the independent external review, because the plan itself made external review final and binding. Here, the court treated the external review as part of the claims process, so it considered those documents too. The full findings of fact are in yesterday's issue.

Harris Beach's read on East Coast Advanced Plastic Surgery v. Cigna, which we covered Monday, is most useful on what may remain after the ruling: the firm suggests providers may still have contract or promissory estoppel claims where a payor made enforceable commitments around the IDR process, while acknowledging the decision leaves other enforcement routes uncertain. Context for the stakes: the provider there had won more than $3 million in IDR awards it alleged went unpaid, and the ruling limits the collection lawsuit, not the obligation to pay.

Bloomberg Opinion's Allison Schrager argues that with more than 60 percent of Americans owning stock, largely through $32 trillion in IRAs and DC plans, concentrated AI valuations have become a risk to household savings: “we are all betting on AI taking over the economy.”

A different question about AI, from Don Trone: the consequential one is no longer whether fiduciaries have the right information but whether they have “the moral and ethical capacity to act on it,” and AI, he argues, can supply the transparency that makes acting easier than rationalizing.