Vendor transparency. Understanding fees should not be difficult—as long as you have a vendor or advisor that is transparent in the total revenue it expects to receive and as long as you know the expense of the investment products you have available for participants to invest in.
Service provider expenses. Think of anyone who may do work for you—an attorney, a contractor, a cleaning person. They bill you at an hourly rate. That comes to an annual amount. The same idea should be true within your retirement plan: You want to know who is working for you and what you are paying them, and you especially want to know whether it is a flat annual fee, a per-head fee, or a percentage of your plan's assets. After all, you wouldn t agree to hire attorneys and then give them access to your bank account to pay what they saw fit. And sometimes, with a better view of total revenue, it becomes evident that a cheaper provider may not mean a better provider when you are then able to evaluate the services and level of service you are receiving.
Investment expenses. Investment expenses must be included in your understanding of plan fees. Your investment products within the plan have fees that are required to be disclosed. For example: Fund A charges 76 bps and shares back 25 bps (or 0.76% with a 0.25% paid back to the plan). Do the math and apply their fee to the assets you have in their product—this is their projected revenue for the year—less any revenue sharing if they pay this.
Example Investment Expense Calculation:
Note, this fee is not deducted from your account balance—it is taken out of what would otherwise be your return. And if you lose money, you still pay this on top of it and so do all of your participants.
Revenue sharing. Revenue sharing should be easy to understand. It should be disclosed to you and should be going back to your plan in the form of an ERISA budget and used for the benefit of plan participants. We help our clients understand this by calculating the expenses for them and forecasting the fees and shared revenue, which may move the client to consider another share class that does not pay revenue sharing (or keeping a class that does because the net effect of the shared amount is financially advantageous). If revenue sharing exists, as it does in most plans to some extent, the discussion should then be about what to do with it. Should you allocate back to those participants in the plan that generated the revenue in the first place—or use it to pay hard-dollar expenses that are allowed under the plan? See my colleague's recent series of articles with his insight on this issue.
Year-end balances. A note to the wise: Having expensive funds that generate large sums of revenue sharing to pay for these expenses in a given plan year but that leave a balance carryover to the next plan year is an issue that will come up in an audit (if it hasn t already).
Total cost. After understanding the fees, plan sponsors should address how costs may be affected by participation, plan design, usage, or fund allocation.
Answers. Perhaps most importantly, if someone were to call you and ask what exactly he is paying for when participating in this plan, you would have an answer that could help him make an important decision when it becomes time to retire.
For example: In the chart above, this $30 million plan has a weighted expense ratio of 54 bps. Let's assume the total administration expense (all service providers: recordkeeper, trust company, advisor, auditor) is $80,000 (or ~27 bps) and those fees are paid for on a pro rata basis by all plan participants.
This plan's total annual expense would be estimated as follows:
Investment expense: .54%
+ Vendor expenses: .27%
(-) Revenue sharing: (.22%)
_____________________
Total: .59%
The size of the recent settlements lends perspective on how big of an issue fees can become for a plan sponsor. Sponsors that attend to the principles outlined in this blog and work with their vendors to build transparency around these issues can avoid becoming a statistic.