I joked in many of my writings and I believe in my new book, available on Kindle (cheap plug here), was that when my Managing Attorney at that semi prestigious law firm (sorry, Lois) wanted to quell a topic, she’d create a committee for it.
Plan sponsors can’t be managing attorneys for life; they need to have some sort of committee or apparatus to handle the management of their retirement plan. Being like Lois’ committee on social media for lawyers that did nothing and had no members who knew what social media was is going to cut it.
Plan sponsors need to develop a committee to handle their retirement plan and the committee needs to actually function. It needs to have an agenda and enough members to pursue the action of handling the fiduciary process, the administration, and the fiduciary duty of prudence and paying reasonable expenses. But the committee can’t have too many members because being a former President of a college club and a current trustee of my synagogue, I can attest that too many members on a committee won’t get anything done because half the committee who don’t do anything spend their time complaining about the half that does their job.
A further discussion about this topic can be found here, as I discuss the role of investment committees with Chuck Hammond from the 401(k) Study Group.