When you work as an attorney for a third party administration firm, you see some zany things. When you have so many clients to deal with, every once in a while you run into some zany clients and situations that they never covered in the textbook for my qualified retirement plan course at Boston University’s LLM program in taxation. Here are just some of the zany clients and situations:
There was a radiologist who had a defined benefit plan and was constantly at our offices to meet one of our Managing Partners. He was always trying to cut corners on his defined benefit plan, especially when providing benefits to his employees. He also apparently cut corners on his medical practice as he was permanently enjoined by New York from conducting mammograms because he made too many errors.
I had one client where because of the human resources director; I drafted the plan documents seven times. At one point, she wanted plan eligibility and vesting to be based on elapsed times (which is a period of service with no hours) with 1,000 Hours of Service required. You can’t have elapsed time and require hours, it’s pretty clear in the law. This zany h.r. director was fired pretty soon afterwards.
We had a company in Brooklyn that fired their broker and then not too long after, fired their h.r. director. The h.r. director then dropped the dime on the new chief financial officer who was sharing the commissions with the broker he just hired. The old broker was rehired while the CFO and new broker were terminated.
I will never forget a beneficiary form that a participant filled out. For the relationship that the beneficiary had to this participant, he filled out “Good Time Joe”.
I had a plan participant try to alienate his benefit for his sister’s benefit because he was in jail. He wrote the request on prison stationary.
I had two participants murdered by their beneficiaries.
I had a 401(k) plan sponsor that had an antique toilet as a participant directed investment.
I handled the defined benefit plan of a famous politician that we had set up right before New Year’s. On New Year’s eve, his then girlfriend wanted her own defined benefit plan so that is what I was doing one December 31st.
Once had a client who was in the Greek food business who constantly gave us samples when the financial advisor visited them. We never had such luck with the beer distributor or the liquor distributor.