Regulatory changes due in 2012 will help plan participants see how much their 401(k) is costing them. This new clarity of fees will force plan sponsors to take an overall examine of their company plan.
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Fees
In this, the year before a new series of fee disclosure regulations take hold, plan sponsors’ sense of fees paid by their plans was all over the board. About a quarter of mega plans (those with more than $1 billion in plan assets) said that the “approximate average expense ratio” of all the investment options in their plan was less than 25 basis points (0.25%), a sentiment expressed by nearly one in eight overall. Nearly half of those mega plans said the overall fee was between 25 and 50 basis points, but 8.2% in this market segment said they “didn’t know.” Indeed, the “don’t know” group was a significant group across market segments; one in 10 in the mid-size (plans with between $50 million and $200 million in plan assets) and large (between $200 million and $1 billion) categories admitted that, as did more than 18% in the small-plan (between $5 million and $50 million in plan assets) category, and a full third of those in the micro-plan segment (plans with less than $5 million in plan assets).
That said, more than two-thirds (70.4%) of plan sponsor respondents said they review plan fees annually, and the larger the plan, the more likely they were to do so. However, 6%—mostly among those in the micro-plan segment—admitted they “never” formally review actual administrative costs/fees. In a new question in this year’s survey, we asked who was paying those administrative/recordkeeping costs—and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, a clear plurality (34.6%) said the employer did, and did so exclusively, a finding that included nearly half of micro plans, 29% of small plans, and 15% of plans in the larger segments. On the other hand, larger plans were significantly more likely to say that participants were carrying the costs through revenue-sharing arrangements. In fact, more than a third of mid-size and large plans did so, as did more than a quarter of those in the mega market.
