The initial 2026-2027 Priority Guidance Plan lists 121 projects the agencies intend to prioritize, and the benefits entries sketch the year ahead. From the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the plan includes Trump Account guidance, regulations on the expanded employer child care credit, and guidance on the paid family and medical leave credit. The retirement entries run from an update to the Employee Plans correction program and a new program for correcting IRA mistakes, through SECURE 2.0 guidance including the saver’s match and student-loan matching contributions, to electronic-delivery modernization and defined benefit funding guidance. Other projects address fringe benefits and VEBAs, the tax-exempt trusts some employers use to fund benefits. For executive pay, the plan lists regulations on the deduction limit for high pay at public companies and the parallel excise tax at tax-exempt organizations. The list sets the agencies’ priorities for the coming year. It doesn’t change existing requirements or promise when any project will be finished.

In a new Trucker Huss alert, Bryan Card walks through April's Technical Release 2026-01 on proxy advisory firms, the consultants who advise large investors on how to vote their shares in corporate elections. The Labor Department said such a firm can become an ERISA fiduciary two ways: by exercising control over votes tied to plan shares, or by regularly giving individualized voting advice for a fee. A contract disclaimer saying the advice won't be a 'primary basis' for decisions doesn't settle the question if the actual relationship says otherwise, and the department concluded ERISA generally doesn't preempt state laws requiring proxy advisers to disclose recommendations driven by nonfinancial considerations. This matters mainly for plans invested through collective investment trusts and separately managed accounts, because the shares those vehicles hold are plan assets whose votes belong to the plan. Shares held inside a mutual fund generally are not, so advice about voting them usually isn't fiduciary advice to the plan.

Ary Rosenbaum's short take on Technical Release 2026-02, in which the Labor Department concluded that Trump Accounts and most employer contribution programs tied to them won't be treated as pension plans under ERISA. The accounts belong to children, not employees, and the department described limits on employer involvement that keep a program outside Title I. His point for employers is that the guidance answers the ERISA-coverage question and that question only; the written-program, certification, and contribution-limit requirements still apply.

Ron Surz questions how personalized an investment service can be when it's chosen automatically for workers who haven't provided any information about their finances or comfort with risk. A qualified default investment alternative is the investment a 401(k) plan uses for employees who never make a choice, so, he argues, the personalization in a managed-account default rests entirely on recordkeeper data about age and wealth, with no read on how much risk the person is willing to take. Of the roughly $16 trillion the research firm Cerulli counts in managed accounts across workplace plans and IRAs, Surz puts less than $1 trillion in the default version, and a 2024 survey by the consulting firm NEPC found 46% of plans offer managed accounts while only 9% default participants into them. He favors customized target-date funds built to workforce demographics instead.

Roughly half of plan sponsors offer managed accounts, professionally managed investments tailored to the individual participant, but the research firm Cerulli finds only about 5 percent of participants use one. Brokerage windows, which let participants buy investments beyond the plan's own menu, show up in 29 percent of plans, rising past 60 percent among the largest. The panel urged employers considering any personalized option to ask whether workers would actually use it and whether the added cost over a target-date fund is justified for workers whose finances are still simple. Customization that looks past age and risk tolerance to outside assets, spousal income, and Social Security timing costs more than the default it replaces.

Fred Barstein argues that guaranteed-income options have struggled to gain ground in 401(k) plans despite 20 years of predictions. Nothing requires them, few sponsors ask for them, and advisers' financial incentives, he argues, can favor rollovers over income products offered inside a plan. He cites T. Rowe Price data that 76 percent of billion-dollar plan sponsors want to retain participant assets while more than 95 percent of smaller plans don't. He predicts adoption will arrive the way target-date funds arrived, through automatic enrollment into a default investment that includes a guaranteed income component, not through persuading participants one at a time.

The Economic Innovation Group's updated census-data analysis puts the coverage gap at 76.2 million workers: 61 million employed by an organization that offers them no plan, 15 million self-employed. Nearly half of private-sector workers (49.1 percent) lack access, and among part-time workers the number is 77 percent. The gap is especially wide between lower-paid and higher-paid workers. Among the lowest-paid tenth of private-sector workers, 88 percent lack access, against 14 percent of the highest-paid tenth. Only 37 percent of workers received any employer contribution in 2025, with a median of about $3,000. EIG's policy answer is the Retirement Savings for Americans Act, a House bill that would create federally administered accounts for uncovered workers.

Segal analyzed claims from large employer health plans covering more than four million people. Among patients with diabetes in those plans, nearly half now take Mounjaro, Ozempic or another GLP-1. Since January 2021 the share using insulin has been cut almost in half, metformin use has dropped 17 percentage points, and fewer than 2% still take DPP-4 inhibitors. As treatment guidelines move GLP-1s earlier, prescribers are taking patients off the older, cheaper drugs, which is part of what plan sponsors are seeing in their prescription drug costs.

When the No Surprises Act passed, regulators projected about 22,000 payment disputes a year. Providers initiated 2.6 million in 2025, and of the disputes that reached a decision, providers won 85%, at a median award more than four times the plan's median in-network rate. Research cited in a Georgetown University analysis puts costs attributable to the arbitration process at $22.4 billion from 2022 through 2025. The post explains the process, in which each side proposes a payment and the arbitrator must pick one number or the other, and the September letter in which 67 employer, consumer and patient groups asked Congress to replace arbitration with a predictable benchmark payment. Employers with self-funded plans should ask their claims administrator how many disputes involve their plan and what the awards are costing. Choosing in-network care can reduce exposure, but it doesn't eliminate surprise bills from out-of-network clinicians working at in-network hospitals.

EY surveyed about 100 HR and benefits leaders in April about value-based care, the model that ties what a plan pays to quality and outcomes rather than to the volume of services delivered. Forty percent haven't tied any health spending to such models, nearly half of the adopters call their use limited rather than scaled, 45% plan no changes over the next three years, and only 3% run more than 31% of medical spend through value-based payment. The same employers name controlling medical and pharmacy costs as their top benefits priority.

An eHealth survey of more than 500 small and midsized business owners and managers finds 54 percent of those offering group coverage facing double-digit premium increases for 2027, and 73 percent actively weighing whether to drop the benefit altogether. The options discussed run from raising deductibles to reimbursement arrangements that give employees money to buy their own individual coverage, with the caveat that savings from cutting coverage tend to leak back out through higher wages and harder hiring.

In a 2023 IRS example, an employee pays $1,200 a month before taxes for a wellness policy and receives $1,000 a month for participating in wellness activities. Because the payment doesn't reimburse an actual, unreimbursed medical expense, the IRS says every dollar of it is taxable. In this podcast episode, Mercer's Wade Symons and Lori Fischler explain why calling a payment a wellness benefit doesn't make it tax free; there must be a basis in the tax code, meaning a substantiated, unreimbursed medical expense or indemnity coverage bought with after-tax dollars. The IRS has been playing, in their phrase, whack-a-mole with these designs since the early 2000s, and the agency's decision not to finalize related regulations in 2024 is no green light.

For World Mental Health Day on October 10, the International Foundation offers a practical guide for managers on helping employees who may be struggling. It covers how to recognize when something is wrong, how to approach the conversation and refer to resources rather than counsel, and how to plan accommodations and a return to work that stick, including managing co-worker reactions. The underlying material comes from Canada's Workplace Strategies for Mental Health, so its legal-duty references track Canadian law, but the management guidance travels well. The Foundation also flags its free virtual conference on workplace mental health, October 7.

Seventy-three percent of companies told the Business Group on Health that use of mental health and substance-use services rose in 2025. One response profiled is the crisis receiving center, a walk-in emergency room for behavioral health whose operator says 65 percent of patients who would otherwise wait for an inpatient bed can be stabilized and discharged with a plan within 24 hours. The article also examines employees' fear of being judged (48 percent worry colleagues would), recovery apps entering benefit menus, and a recommendation to introduce new mental health benefits off-cycle, away from the noise of open enrollment.

Carrot founder Tammy Sun on why menopause benefits have moved from niche to mainstream since the company launched its virtual midlife clinic in 2022. Sun says only about one in five OB-GYNs is trained in menopause care, so routing employees straight to a knowledgeable provider could help them find appropriate care sooner, and she puts the cost of replacing a senior leader at $200,000 or more. She argues that better care can reduce costs and help employers retain experienced workers, and her pitch to finance chiefs is framed in exactly those terms.

Jay Keeton explains how a tax-exempt or governmental employer can combine a 457(b) plan with a separate 457(f) arrangement to provide additional executive compensation. A 457(b) plan can receive employee deferrals and employer contributions, subject to annual limits. A 457(f) arrangement can promise an additional benefit conditioned on continued service, like the article's example of a $200,000 retention benefit forfeited if the executive leaves within three years. The timing deserves care. The benefit generally becomes taxable income when the executive earns an unconditional right to it, even if payment comes later, so employers should coordinate vesting, payment, and payroll-tax treatment so the executive can cover the resulting tax bill.

The firm closes its six-part series with a checklist of its recommendations for executive pay. Review compensation arrangements before merger talks begin, when planning can still help, rather than at the closing table. Check deferred compensation documents regularly, because operating correctly under a flawed document doesn't prevent tax penalties. Confirm the valuations behind private-company equity awards. And calendar the 30-day window for a Section 83(b) election, the choice to be taxed on restricted equity when it's granted rather than as it vests. That window opens when the equity is transferred, and it can't be reopened. The firm also recommends modeling what executives will actually keep after taxes, since the headline number rarely matches the take-home result.

Lush Cosmetics extended 26 weeks of paid parental leave to full-time U.S. and Canadian retail, manufacturing, and support workers with a year of service, matching its U.K. policy and covering birthing, nonbirthing, and adoptive parents. Only 14 percent of U.S. retail workers have access to paid parental leave, which makes the move unusual for the sector. The company sees longer leave as a way to keep experienced employees. Its workforce is 66 percent women, it promotes heavily from within, and its U.K. stores learned in the 2010s that short leaves produced returns followed by quick departures.

Judge Cogan denied the hospital system’s motion to dismiss in its entirety. Three self-funded union welfare funds allege that NewYork-Presbyterian’s contracts with insurers violate the Sherman Act and New York’s Donnelly Act through three kinds of terms. An insurer that wants any NYP hospital in a network must allegedly take every NYP facility at the highest coverage tier, a single negotiated rate applies flagship-hospital pricing at every location, and gag clauses block price disclosure. The court found the funds could bring the claims because they bear the hospital costs themselves; the plans, not their network vendors, are the direct purchasers with standing to sue over the contracting that sets the prices they pay. The proposed class reaches everyone who purchased in-network inpatient general acute care from the system over four years, and the case now heads into discovery.

Deborah Barbieri worked at Legg Mason for three and a half years at $85 an hour on an offer letter calling her temporary, and received no benefits the whole time. Judge Gardephe’s decision rules on a motion to dismiss that was filed in October 2021 and sat undecided for almost five years. It goes plan by plan, and the temporary label controlled only where each plan’s own text made it decisive. The 401(k) claim survives because “employed on a temporary, as needed, basis” is ambiguous as applied to a multi-year hire. The stock purchase plan claim survives because its exclusions reach part-timers and short-season workers and never mention temps. The vacation and paid-time-off claims survive because nobody identified an exclusion at all. Only the severance claim fails, on language unambiguously excluding “any individual categorized by the Company as a temporary employee.” Employers who rely on worker labels should read this one next to their own plan documents.

Two participants in Principal’s $4.6 billion Select Savings Plan allege the menu is Principal top to bottom, with the only exceptions company stock, two SEI trust funds and a brokerage window. The sharpest allegation goes to fees on five insurance investment accounts. The participants claim Principal Life keeps between 19 and 37 percent of the management fee on those accounts even though outside firms manage the investments. A second count challenges the proprietary target-date funds, built on Principal index funds the complaint says cost several times what BlackRock, Northern Trust and Vanguard charge for the same exposure, and the retention of a large-cap growth fund that trailed the Russell 1000 Growth index in every reported period. Chimicles Schwartz Kriner and Ellzey Kherkher filed September 22 in Chicago federal court. Principal hasn’t yet responded in court.

Lockton runs one of the country’s largest insurance brokerages, and two of its employees now claim it put itself on both sides of its own benefits plan. Lockton sponsors its welfare plan and serves as the plan’s named fiduciary, and the complaint alleges it also installed itself as the plan’s broker. In that role, the suit says, Lockton picked the carriers for employee-paid products from life insurance to long-term disability, set its own commission and fee structure, and let carriers build that compensation into the premiums employees paid by payroll deduction. The complaint puts that compensation at $3.3 million from 2020 through 2024, drawn from the plan’s own government filings, with some fees routed through a benefits-communication firm Lockton fully acquired in 2025. The claims accuse Lockton of using its position to benefit itself at employees’ expense, and the relief sought includes repayment of the allegedly improper compensation and appointment of an independent person to oversee the plan. Capozzi Adler filed October 1 in Kansas City federal court, the latest in a wave of voluntary-benefits suits filed since December 2025. Lockton hasn’t yet responded in court.

Yohanna Wallace has filed her opposition to Pilgrim’s Pride’s motion to dismiss her suit over the 401(k) plan’s only stable value option, a Great-West general account contract. The plaintiff argues the contract exposed participants to more risk while paying less than five safer alternatives, every year from 2013 through 2024, and that the plan’s fiduciaries never used their bargaining power to demand better rates or a better product. The brief leans on decisions issued in summer 2026 sustaining nearly identical claims, including one involving the same Great-West contract, and it cites the Supreme Court’s pending Anderson v. Intel case, set for argument October 6, on what a participant must plead. The motion is now with Judge Sweeney in Colorado federal court.

Capital Group has asked the Supreme Court to review the Ninth Circuit’s July 30 decision refusing to send an ERISA fiduciary-breach suit against it to arbitration. Whether plan arbitration provisions can keep participants’ fiduciary-breach claims out of court is a question the courts of appeals have divided over for years. The Court requested a response to the petition on October 1, after the participant initially waived one; her response is due November 2. The justices haven’t decided whether to hear the case.

Donovan Pyle argues that employers should regularly measure how employees view their benefits and document how they respond, turning impressions into evidence a benefits committee can act on and defend. His example comes from a midsized firm paying about $180,000 a year for four standalone benefit programs. Three had adoption under 4 percent, so the firm cut them and redirected $135,000 to lowering the medical deductible, a change employees could actually feel.

The third installment on brokerage consolidation turns to conflicts of interest. When the brokerage, carrier, pharmacy benefit manager, claims administrator, and stop-loss carrier are owned by or economically aligned with the same enterprise, the article argues, common ownership can weaken the independent oversight that catches overpayments and unfavorable terms. As one consultant puts it, the conflict is structural, built into the organization chart before a single decision gets made. The article ties the scrutiny directly to the recent wave of ERISA fiduciary suits over medical claims, drug pricing, and voluntary benefits.