Each year the IRS provides cost-of-living adjustments to benefit plan limits to assist sponsors in administering their plans. On November 1, the IRS released Notice 2018-83, which provided 2019 limits for retirement plans. Information on the release can be found here. Some of the key limits are shown below, along with the increase in the Social Security taxable wage base … Read More

When the Society of Actuaries (SOA) released the RP-2014 mortality table in 2014, they included mortality improvement scale MP-2014. The purpose of this scale is to reflect mortality improvement into the future, since one would expect future mortality rates to be lower with further advances in health and medicine. A practice was then started to update this improvement scale annually … Read More

As mentioned in our August 28th Retirement Blog, an exposure draft of mortality tables based on public retirement plan experience has been released by the Society of Actuaries and the Retirement Plans Experience Committee (“RPEC”). We have completed our review of the draft and will summarize our findings in this post. Highlights The study was based on data gathered from … Read More

On August 31, 2018, President Trump released an Executive Order on “Strengthening Retirement Security in America.” You can see the text here. The Order outlines the issue of low workplace retirement plan coverage and seeks to ease the regulatory burdens that might prevent employers from offering such solutions. The Order specifically directs the Secretaries of Labor and Treasury to explore … Read More

The Society of Actuaries has released an exposure draft for their public retirement plan mortality study. This study focuses exclusively on the mortality experience of public retirement plans, in contrast to the Society’s previous study which excluded public experience. The goals of this study were not just to develop public mortality tables, but also to examine the data for insights into … Read More

On June 26, 2018, the Society of Actuaries (SOA) released a study of the mortality assumptions used for funding purposes by state-based and large-city public pension plans.  The study includes comparisons of how the mortality tables being used now compare to the latest mortality tables developed by the SOA (based on corporate pension plan data). Two items that we noted … Read More