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From the Executive Editor

Hi everyone. As you are reading this, your busy season will have just ended. I hope it went smoothly and was not too stressful for all of you. A couple of days ago I was, as usual, stressing about whether I would have content for this month’s edition, and then like manna from heaven, content fell into my lap. Which made me ask myself the question: What the heck is manna? I’ve never seen it in a market anywhere. Here’s a link to Wikipedia’s explanation if you are interested. In my case the “content manna” that fell from heaven was two posts on the ACOPA listserv. 
 
The first one relates to an email from Ilene Ferenczy on the issue of whether financial advisors are professionals for purposes of being exempt from PBGC coverage. Ilene’s email surprised a lot of us, because most practitioners have taken the position that financial advisers are not professionals and are covered by PBGC. It’s obviously a huge issue because if they are covered by PBGC they are not subject to the combined deduction limit but if they are exempt they should be subject to this limit. Ilene’s email is here — thanks to Ilene for letting me share it here with you.
 
The second issue posted was guidance from the IRS on cash balance plan designs that they don’t like too much. I’m always amused when I see things like this, because I’ve never comprehended how anyone would think that designs like this would fly, but clearly that viewpoint wasn’t shared by everyone. Anyway, guidance is always helpful.
 
The final 430 regulations gave us a new rule for plan years beginning in 2016 or later about amending a Schedule SB to designate a contribute to a different plan year. In response to a discussion about this issue on the listserv, I asked Kevin Donovan to write an article that outlines the issues this raises. Kevin and his fellow actuaries at Pinnacle Plan Design, Lynn Young and Sheri Alsguth, collaborated on this article
 
As part of our ongoing set of articles on professionalism, Lynn Young has submitted one on keeping up with the ASOPs. Lynn’s article is here.
 
Our regular update from our El Presidente Grande Kurt Piper is here.
 
And our usual update from Judy Miller (a.k.a., the person who keeps us ticking) is here.
 
With the personal tax filing deadline here, I thought this article from the New York Times on getting tax returns filed was very interesting

 

Enjoy your rest and recuperation post busy season!

 

Cheers,

 

Norm