August 15, 2026

ADP Inc. agreed to a $48 million settlement in Berkelhammer v. ADP TotalSource Group, ending six years of litigation over its multiple-employer 401(k) plan (114,000+ participants, $4.4B in assets). Plaintiffs alleged excessive recordkeeping fees paid to Voya, imprudent investment selection, and failure to monitor service providers. Preliminary approval was sought July 31, 2026.

The non-monetary relief is the real headline: the fiduciary committee must review at least three target-date fund options with an investment consultant, all new committee members must receive fiduciary training from outside counsel for two years, and an independent fiduciary is required if ADP seeks reimbursement for administrative services. Courts are increasingly ordering process, not just money.

Smith & Nephew agreed to a $350,000 class settlement covering ~29,000 participants in its U.S. Savings Plan for the period Aug 30, 2018 – May 13, 2026. Claims: unreasonable compensation for financial planning/advice (managed account) services, improper use of forfeited plan assets, and failure to monitor the plan committee. Objection deadline Sept 4, 2026; fairness hearing Sept 18, 2026. The company denies liability.

Two of the hottest current theories appear in one complaint — managed-account pricing and the use of forfeitures. And note the size: $350K on a mid-size plan shows this litigation is no longer aimed only at mega-plans.

Treasury and the IRS issued Notice 2026-49 on August 12, 2026, delivering the sample forms Congress mandated in SECURE 2.0 §324. The notice proposes four sample forms and a standardized five-step rollover procedure for movement between employer plans and IRAs (not IRA-to-IRA, which stays under ACATS/FINRA protocols), pushing the industry toward electronic plan-to-plan transfers. Comments are due October 23, 2026.

Rollover paperwork is one of the highest-friction, highest-error areas of plan administration, and it is where participant complaints and lost-asset problems begin. Standardized forms shift the expectation of what a well-run plan’s process looks like.

Notice 2026-49 is the direct implementation of SECURE 2.0 §324 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023), which directed Treasury to issue sample forms and protocols to simplify and expedite rollovers. Additional guidance is under consideration, and Treasury has explicitly asked stakeholders for comments on the proposed forms and procedures.

SECURE 2.0 items keep landing on plan sponsors as operational work with real deadlines. This one is optional today and expected practice tomorrow.

Revenue Procedure 2026-30 (issued Aug 5, 2026) makes electronic filing mandatory and standardizes submissions for employee-plan letter rulings and determination requests, effective September 4, 2026.

Any plan mid-correction, mid-restatement, or seeking a ruling has a hard process change in three weeks. Paper submissions after the effective date create avoidable delay in matters that are usually time-sensitive.

FAB 2026-01 sets out EBSA’s guiding principles for enforcement: prioritize the most egregious conduct and significant harm, prioritize criminal cases involving misappropriation of plan assets, and in civil enforcement focus on breaches of the duty of loyalty — actions not taken for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits. EBSA states it intends to move away from ‘regulation by enforcement’ toward compliance assistance and formal rulemaking.

A softer posture on novel theories is not a softer posture on the basics. Loyalty-based cases — self-dealing, misapplied plan assets, late deposits, fees that benefit someone other than participants — remain squarely in the crosshairs.

Morgan Lewis’s Spring 2026 update analyzes EBSA’s revised enforcement priorities and updated accomplishment statistics, concluding the numbers suggest a slowdown in enforcement activity or at least in recoveries, alongside leadership’s stated shift away from regulation by enforcement and litigation.

Fewer headline recoveries does not mean fewer investigations, and it certainly does not slow private plaintiffs’ counsel — who filed the two settlements at the top of this page.

EBSA’s guidance on reporting delinquent participant contributions reiterates that deferrals become plan assets on the earliest date they can reasonably be segregated from employer assets, and no later than the 15th business day of the following month for pension plans. Delinquent contributions must be reported on Form 5500 Schedule H/I Line 4a and constitute a nonexempt prohibited transaction under ERISA §406 unless corrected under VFCP with PTE 2002-51 relief. The VFCP self-correction component (effective March 17, 2025) allows self-correction where the deposit is corrected within 180 days of the paycheck date and aggregate lost earnings are under $1,000.

Line 4a is a public, permanent flag on your Form 5500 — and it is one of the first things both DOL investigators and plaintiffs’ firms screen for. The 15th-business-day rule is a ceiling, not a safe harbor; the real standard is ‘as soon as reasonably segregable.’

Roper Technologies filed an Item 5.04 current report on August 10, 2026 disclosing a blackout period for two 401(k) plans as recordkeeping moves from Vanguard to Fidelity effective October 2, 2026. The blackout runs from 4:00 p.m. ET September 25 through the week of October 18; participants cannot change elections, move assets, or take loans or distributions. Insiders were notified August 7 of the corresponding trading restriction.

Blackout notices are a strict ERISA §101(i) requirement with a 30–60 day advance notice window, and conversions are where administrative failures cluster: missed deadlines, mapped investments, suspended loans, and participant complaints.

Empower posted after-tax base earnings of $332 million in Q2 2026, up 34% ($85M) year over year on strong retirement plan sales and net inflows. The company announced its $340 million acquisition of Milliman’s retirement plan and benefits administration business on June 30, 2026 — roughly $130 billion in client assets and 1.5 million participants at closing.

Recordkeeper consolidation means your service team, technology platform, and fee schedule can change without you choosing anything. Post-acquisition service degradation is a recurring complaint in the years following these deals.

Northwest Retirement Plan Consultants agreed to a $1.2 million class settlement resolving claims arising from an August 31, 2024 cyberattack that exposed names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of approximately 68,500 individuals — the employees of its plan-sponsor clients. Preliminary approval was granted January 23, 2026, with a final approval hearing held June 12, 2026.

The breach happened at the service provider, but the exposed people were the plan sponsors’ employees. DOL cybersecurity guidance expects plan fiduciaries to evaluate a service provider’s security practices as part of prudent selection and monitoring.

ICI’s Economics of Providing 401(k) Plans reports that at year-end 2024, 401(k) assets totaled $8.9 trillion with 38% in equity mutual funds, and participants invested in equity mutual funds paid an average expense ratio of 0.26%. ICI explicitly cautions that these broad averages are not intended for benchmarking a specific plan’s costs.

That caveat is the point. Averages get quoted in committee meetings as if they were a standard; courts look at whether your plan’s fees were reasonable for the services your plan received.