Small businesses that seek to improve their retirement plans should have access to more information from the federal government. That is the recommendation of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which in a recent report steers clear of advocating bold moves and suggests that the federal government improve what it’s already doing in order to better support small businesses in providing and administering retirement plans.
In a report released March 5, the GAO recommended creating an interagency taskforce between the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Department of Treasury and the Small Business Administration (SBA). This taskforce would “coordinate existing research, education, and outreach efforts to foster small employer plan sponsorship.”
The GAO’s proposed taskforce would capitalize on existing efforts to foster retirement plans — it would not implement new strategies. The GAO recommends the proposed taskforce, under the DOL leadership, should also research ways to bolster existing efforts and research existing plan designs’ cost-effectiveness.
The two recommendations from the GAO report that didn’t just tweak efforts already in place were: 1) to create a single web portal between the agencies for retirement plan information (a recommendation rejected by the DOL); and 2) for the IRS to modify tax forms to collect better information about retirement plans.
The GAO reached its conclusion after it analyzed data from the DOL and the IRS concerning small employers (those with 100 or fewer employees). And to be fair to the government, the retirement plan problems that many small employers reported — such as concerns about meeting fiduciary responsibilities, or a lack of financial resources, time or personnel — are
addressed via the DOL, IRS and SBA.