The SIMPLE retirement plan?

• Author: Koppel, Michael D.
• Position: Savings incentive match plans for employees - Brief Article

Congress is obviously concerned about small businesses not providing retirement plans for their employees. Therefore, as part of the Small Business Job Protection Act of 1996, it created a new form of retirement plan specifically for small businesses - Savings Incentive Match Plans for Employees (SIMPLE).

To have a SIMPLE plan, an employer must have 100 or fewer employees who earned at least $5,000 during the previous year. Additionally, the employer cannot maintain any other qualified plan. A SIMPLE plan will allow employees to make contributions of up to $6.000 per year. (The $6,000 limitation is indexed for inflation in $500 increments.)

Trustees of a SIMPLE account must provide basic information to the employer and the Secretary of the Treasury annually. The employers must provide the employees with information about their rights to make salary reductions as well as the contribution alternatives elected by the employer.

There are several points to note about these requirements: * Trustees and employers maintaining plans are not required to meet the general reporting requirements of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). * The plan can be arranged so that the employer maintaining the...