The amended Transparency in Coverage rules published in the Federal Register on October 6, and publication turns the compliance windows into fixed dates. The rules take effect December 7, 2026. The pricing file changes, including the shift to one in-network file per provider network and quarterly updates, apply March 6, 2027. The new contextual files and the required website footer link follow on September 6, 2027, and the existing 2020-rule requirements stay in force until each date arrives. The self-service tool changes, including the right to request cost-sharing estimates by phone and a new balance billing caution statement, apply for plan years beginning on or after January 1, 2027, a date the agencies declined to extend despite requests for six to twelve more months. For sponsors the near-term work is contractual. The rules let an insured plan shift these duties to its insurer by written agreement, while self-funded plans keep ultimate responsibility no matter who builds the files, so administrator and vendor agreements signed this fall should name the March and September dates and the new accuracy attestations.

Mercer works through the mechanics of S. 5040, the bill from the top Democrats on Senate Finance and House Ways and Means targeting mega retirement balances. Starting in 2027, high earners, with income thresholds running from $225,000 to $450,000 by filing status, could make no new contributions once combined DC plan and IRA balances exceed $10 million, with a 6 percent excise tax backstopping the limit. Starting in 2034 the bill would force distributions of half the excess over $10 million, Roth first for balances above $20 million, and employers would be required to permit those distributions. Mercer also flags what was dropped from the 2021 version, the ban on Roth conversions of after-tax amounts and the $2.5 million account reporting requirement. The proposal faces long odds in the current Congress, but it is the clearest marker yet of where Democratic tax writers would start if the majority changes.

Employers that file Form 8955-SSA electronically need to prepare for a change in IRS systems. The FIRE system stops accepting filings November 19, and the newer IRIS platform becomes the only electronic option in January, so current FIRE users need an IRIS Transmitter Control Code application moving before the 2027 filing season. In the underlying question, Groom Law Group attorneys and CAPTRUST’s Michael Webb explain that Form 8955-SSA, which reports former employees who have earned benefits they haven’t collected, does not travel with the Form 5500 through the Labor Department’s EFAST2 system; it is a stand-alone return filed directly with the IRS, and electronic filing is generally mandatory for anyone required to file ten or more information returns in a year.

Three research shops land on the same gap. In DCIIA’s survey of pre-retirees, only 22 percent said their workplace plan offered guaranteed lifetime income, and another 29 percent did not know whether theirs does. Participants with access to guaranteed income or financial advice were more likely to report investing in it; 56 percent of those with access said they had invested, 68 percent of those working with an adviser held guaranteed income versus 40 percent of those without one, and the share rose to 86 percent after an in-depth income conversation with that adviser. LIMRA’s companion report has 71 percent of pre-retirees interested in protected lifetime income, with fees, loss of control and locked-up money as the stated holdups. Interest is substantial, but availability, fees and concerns about access to the money all appear to affect uptake.

Two studies published October 6 map how the line between plan advice and wealth management keeps blurring. Cerulli and Morningstar’s Building the Bridge to Wealth finds 63 percent of surveyed advisers treat DC plans as at least a moderate priority for wealth prospecting, while 40 percent of participants already work with an adviser and, among those who do not, 20 percent want to hire one and 45 percent are undecided. The barriers are perception; 54 percent of unadvised participants believe they are not wealthy enough and 67 percent doubt advisory fees are worth the cost. A companion Crisil Coalition Greenwich study of hybrid investors adds a caution for the industry, clients who combine advised and self-directed accounts are 67 percent more likely to consider leaving their adviser and three times more open to automated advice. Sponsors should expect more financial wellness programs and one-on-ones that are also, candidly, prospecting.

BlackRock’s Future of Wealth report surveys 1,067 affluent and high-net-worth women alongside 409 advisers, 84 percent of them male, and finds the two groups describing different clients. Women rank growing wealth, preserving wealth and creating retirement income as their top priorities; advisers guessed preservation, supporting family and life transitions, and ranked growing wealth eighth. The biggest disconnect is where the money came from. 79 percent of the women say salary and career earnings built their wealth, while 63 percent of advisers assume inheritance and 62 percent assume marriage or partnership. With women projected to control $34 trillion in U.S. investable assets by 2030, BlackRock argues the workplace, with its equity compensation, plan savings and executive benefits, is where engagement starts.

Report, fielded through Dynata, finds 82 percent of employees still contributing to their workplace retirement plan but only 34 percent expecting to retire comfortably. The number that should bother HR is about its own programs; employee confidence in employer financial wellness support fell from 74 percent to 35 percent in a year. Cost of living leads retirement worries at 45 percent, ahead of Social Security at 34 percent, and 22 percent have already dipped into retirement savings with another 19 percent considering it in the next year. The spillover is concrete. 38 percent say financial stress has strongly affected their mental health at work, 23 percent have declined employer benefits because of cost, and 63 percent have considered changing jobs over their finances, half of those specifically for better benefits.

The SECURE Acts raised the statutory required minimum distribution ages to 72 and then 73, but Code section 401(a)(9) sets the latest permissible commencement date, not the plan’s own. A defined benefit plan whose document independently defines its required beginning date as April 1 following age 70 1/2 may keep starting benefits at 70 1/2, a result the preamble to Treasury’s 2024 final RMD regulations confirms directly. The answer lives in the plan document rather than the statute, so check whether yours states its own age or merely incorporates the Code by reference. The amendment clock runs either way; required SECURE amendments, including the technical RMD updates, are generally due by December 31 of this year.

Employee Fiduciary’s explainer walks through match design end to end with 2026 numbers in place, the $24,500 deferral limit, the $72,000 cap on total contributions and the $360,000 compensation limit. It covers the standard formulas and their tradeoffs, single-tier and multi-tier matches, stretch formulas that buy more deferral per match dollar, safe harbor designs, including the automatic-enrollment variety, with their vesting rules, and discretionary matches that trade predictability for flexibility. The true-up discussion is the part worth confirming with payroll; employees who max out early can miss part of the match if it is calculated paycheck by paycheck and the plan does not make a year-end adjustment. Roth matching contributions under SECURE 2.0 get a practical treatment too.

Employers with six or more Massachusetts employees must file the annual Health Insurance Responsibility Disclosure form through MassTaxConnect, with the window opening November 15 and the filing due December 15. The six-employee test looks at DUA wage reports over the trailing twelve months, so companies with even a small Massachusetts footprint can be covered. The form collects plan-level information the state uses to run its MassHealth Premium Assistance program, which can move eligible employees into subsidized coverage that coordinates with the employer plan. Aon confirms the requirements are unchanged for 2026. A payroll vendor can transmit the filing, but the employer owns its accuracy, so calendar the window and confirm who is actually submitting.

Employers shouldn’t assume their health plan administrator’s standard coverage complies with mental health parity requirements, or that someone else is preparing the required comparison of restrictions on mental health and medical benefits. The International Foundation distills new Labor Department guidance recommending that plan fiduciaries build parity into how they select and monitor service providers. When different companies administer medical and mental health benefits, employers need to make sure someone brings both sets of information together; the Department’s enforcement reports say plans with split arrangements rarely get a complete comparison from either vendor, and reconciling the two administrators’ information is the plan’s job. The piece reprints the Department’s sample questions for current and prospective vendors, from whether the comparison comes with the contract or at extra cost to how mental health network access is measured against medical, then lays out monitoring steps for medical necessity reviews and network adequacy. It closes by flagging a deregulatory parity proposal on the agenda for December.

Mercer’s practitioner read of the Labor Department’s parity enforcement bulletin organizes FAB 2026-03 into three enforcement priorities and a red-flag list worth running against your own plan, age limits on applied behavior analysis therapy, exclusions of medication-assisted treatment for addiction, exclusions of residential treatment or intensive outpatient care, different telehealth restrictions for mental health and medical care, and network admission and payment methods that treat behavioral providers differently. It also catalogs which portions of the 2024 parity rule the agencies will not enforce for now, and notes the promise of a new proposed mental health parity rule by the end of 2026.

KFF’s updated tracker counts 11 carriers announcing full or partial exits from the ACA marketplaces for 2027 against six entering new states. Cigna is the headline departure, leaving the individual market in all 11 of its states after reporting more than 350,000 on-exchange members in the first quarter. KFF ties the retrenchment to the expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits at the end of 2025, which already cut sign-ups by more than a million between the 2025 and 2026 open enrollments, shrinking the market and likely worsening the risk pool as healthier enrollees drop first. Employers feel this indirectly but concretely. Fewer individual-market options can make employer-funded individual coverage less attractive, narrow the alternatives for departing employees weighing COBRA, and raise the stakes of the subsidy fight Congress has not resolved.

Anthem’s Virginia plans sued AGS Health, the billing manager for a network of Schumacher emergency physician groups, alleging a scheme of falsely attesting that thousands of billing disputes were eligible for No Surprises Act arbitration, many of which Anthem says belonged under Virginia’s own balance billing law instead. Judge Robert S. Ballou dismissed all ten counts with prejudice. The court rejected Anthem’s attempt to challenge the awards through separate racketeering, benefits-law and state-law claims. Challenges had to fit the narrow grounds for overturning arbitration awards, and Anthem’s allegations did not meet that test. Anthem raised its eligibility objections during the arbitrations and the arbitrators rejected them, which defeated the fraud theory, and arbitrators empowered to decide eligibility do not exceed their powers by deciding it. The opinion joins a line of 2026 decisions reaching the same result against Anthem, Aetna and Blue Cross plans in California, Florida, Texas and Georgia.

Air ambulance operator PHI Health sued Anthem, dozens of employers and their health plans in Kentucky on October 6, seeking $2.6 million in unpaid balances on 116 No Surprises Act arbitration awards. Defendants include Walmart, Amazon, Toyota and the University of Kentucky. Beyond collecting the awards, PHI alleges that plan fiduciaries failed to respond to warning signs about Anthem’s payment practices. The complaint cites demand letters, other lawsuits and trade reporting that allegedly put them on notice, and says Anthem had accumulated more than a thousand unpaid awards approaching $30 million nationwide. PHI asks for corrective action that could include replacing Anthem as administrator, along with monetary relief. The court hasn’t ruled on those allegations.

A new lawsuit against Rockland Trust puts detailed fund comparisons at the center of its challenge to the bank’s roughly $300 million 401(k) plan. Filed October 7, the day after the Supreme Court heard Anderson v. Intel, Labelle v. Rockland Trust alleges that plan fiduciaries kept the T. Rowe Price Growth Stock Fund despite years of returns below its Russell 1000 Growth benchmark. The complaint identifies six other investments, two Fidelity funds, two JPMorgan funds, an Alger fund and a Russell 1000 Growth index fund, and compares their objectives, risks and potential rewards, supported by quarterly measures of performance adjusted for risk. It is also the same T. Rowe Price fund an Oregon court found insufficiently pleaded in Foley v. Legacy Health on September 30. Those details address the question now before the Supreme Court. How similar must investments be before their returns support a claim that plan fiduciaries acted imprudently? The comparisons give the plaintiff’s argument more substance, but whether they are enough to keep the case in court remains undecided.

A warehouse associate who represented himself largely lost his benefits case against Amazon after a bench trial before Judge Drew Tipton over the company’s Texas occupational injury benefit plan, but won two rulings that other employers should notice. First, the plan’s one-year limitations period, though reasonable under Heimeshoff, was unenforceable for all three injury claims; two appeal denials never disclosed the period, and the third stated the period but omitted the calendar date it expired, which the disability claims regulation has separately required since April 2018. The court noted no circuit has decided the calendar-date question and declined to enforce the deadline anyway. Second, Amazon owes a $6,050 statutory penalty for furnishing the plan document as an email attachment the claimant credibly testified he could not open; emailing a document is not delivery reasonably calculated to ensure actual receipt unless the electronic disclosure safe harbor is actually satisfied, and nobody followed up. Claims teams should pull a sample denial letter this week and check for a concrete expiration date, and make sure requested plan documents actually reach the employee.

Peter Sessions’ weekly survey leads with the Anderson argument, reading it as a good day for plan administrators. Two mental health decisions stand out in the rest of the issue. In the Northern District of California, the court in the long-running Wit reprocessing litigation against United Behavioral Health granted most of the class’s summary judgment motion, giving binding effect to earlier findings that the company’s coverage guidelines were improperly restrictive and excusing further administrative appeals as pointless, which keeps the largest behavioral health claims administration case in the country moving. And an Illinois court allowed a mental health parity claim over round-the-clock nursing coverage at a residential treatment center to proceed against a plan sponsored by insurance brokerage Arthur J. Gallagher. The survey also collects the week’s decisions on late appeals, discretionary clause bans, a pension calculator error that produced no remedy, and a $497,500 preliminary settlement approval.

The distinction that matters in Groom’s recap of the Anderson argument is between claims built on investment performance and claims attacking the decision-making process. The Ninth Circuit required a meaningful benchmark only when a plaintiff asks the court to infer imprudence from how an investment performed; a complaint that pleads facts about a flawed fiduciary process directly does not need a comparator at all. At argument, the justices appeared broadly agreed that performance-based claims need an apples-to-apples comparator, and the open question is how much content the Court will give the word meaningful, with a fund’s objectives, risk-adjusted returns and stated benchmarks among the candidates. Groom expects a decision at the beginning of next year.

In Sonderling v. Sills, the Fifth Circuit affirmed summary judgment making the president and sole owner of Coastal Bridge Company personally liable for $209,466.34 plus interest, and permanently barred him from serving as an ERISA fiduciary. The company withheld employee premium contributions without forwarding them to its dental, vision and voluntary coverage insurers, then stopped reimbursing Blue Cross under its self-funded medical plan, leaving at least 78 participants with $172,351.35 in denied claims. Unanswered requests for admission established the owner’s control over plan assets, and the court held that deciding which bills got paid was itself a fiduciary function, that the HR director’s signature on the administrative services agreement did not matter, and that neither corporate insolvency nor a surety’s control of receivables excuses failing to remit employee money. The owner could not use employees’ premium money to cover the company’s other bills.

In its June 17 decision in Justman v. Accenture, now drawing commentary, the Third Circuit held that a denial of benefits claim under ERISA section 502(a)(1)(B) must be brought against the entity obligated to pay benefits or the one that controls the benefit determination, not merely the employer designated as plan administrator. Prudential denied the accidental death claim and later settled; Accenture, which retained administrative duties but no authority over claims decisions, was dismissed, and a separate fiduciary claim failed because the complaint did not adequately allege a missed disclosure deadline or resulting harm. For sponsors the decision is a reason to make sure plan documents and summary plan descriptions say plainly who decides claims, and that practice matches the paper. Clean allocation of authority is what got Accenture out.

Constangy’s overview of Maryland’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance program lays out a sequence employers need on a calendar now. Contributions begin January 1, 2027 at 0.90 percent of covered payroll up to the Social Security wage cap, split evenly between employer and employee, with the employer share waived below 15 employees; benefits start January 1, 2028 at up to $1,000 a week for up to 12 weeks. Every employer with a Maryland employee must register on the state portal before January 1, 2027, and employers that want a private plan or self-insurance instead of the state program must file a Declaration of Intent by November 15, 2026, then escrow contributions until approval, projected for summer 2027. Eligibility takes 680 hours of Maryland work across any combination of employers, and the covered family circle is wider than the FMLA’s, with in-laws, grandparents and domestic partners included, so valid FAMLI requests will arrive that the FMLA would not recognize.

The District of Columbia’s paid leave cuts took effect October 1 on unusual legal footing. The change rode an emergency act that expires November 11, with identical permanent legislation in congressional review expected to take effect November 20. Employers should watch for legislation addressing the gap between those dates. On the numbers, parental leave stays at 12 weeks and prenatal at two, while family leave drops from 12 weeks to six, medical leave from 12 to ten, and the maximum weekly benefit falls from $1,190 to $1,100 with inflation indexing each October. The reductions run through September 30, 2030, after which current law restores the prior levels, and the mayor’s deeper proposed cuts, which would have eliminated family and medical benefits entirely for a year, did not pass. Employers should post the updated required notice and sync any top-up policies that reference the statutory maximums.

Seyfarth’s walk-through of Notice 2026-28 covers the paid leave credit’s new premium method in working detail. A premium counts only to the extent it funds coverage that would have qualified under the wage method, so portions attributable to non-qualifying employees, state-mandated benefits or non-qualifying leave come out. Blended premiums may be allocated by any reasonable method that is consistent with the policy, objective, documented and applied consistently. And an employer may run the wage and premium methods in the same year as long as no cost is counted twice, as with an insured 60 percent benefit topped up 40 percent from general assets. Employers can rely on the notice now. Comments are due October 16, with the open questions including how premiums paid through voluntary state-facilitated programs are treated.

White & Case previews the American Rescue Plan Act change that takes effect for tax years beginning after December 31, 2026. The $1 million deduction limit will reach an additional five employees beyond the current covered officers, and the new five need not be officers at all, just the next highest compensated employees, determined fresh each year rather than tagged forever under the once-covered-always-covered rule. Proposed regulations issued in January 2025 would count employees across the affiliated group, including foreign subsidiaries, and certain workers employed through professional employer organizations. Final regulations may or may not land before year-end, but the effective date does not move, so compensation committees modeling 2027 should identify the likely additional five now and consider whether any planned payments belong in 2026.

Fintech M1 has launched M1 Advisor, an artificial intelligence financial adviser built into its investing platform and free to clients through 2027. The company reactivated its registered investment adviser entity to offer non-discretionary advice with no human advisers behind it, running on models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Amazon under an internal governance process. The RIA reports $1.85 billion under management, and the system can see a client’s outside 401(k)s, IRAs and loans through Plaid, though it only advises and cannot act. The claim worth watching from the plan world is the legal one, SEC-registered fiduciary advice generated entirely by machine. Participant-facing advice tools carry the same questions about conflicts, disclosures and accountability when the model is wrong, and somebody was going to run this experiment first.