Every retirement plan provider has clients they barely hear from. Months go by without an email or telephone call. Everything seems quiet, which can make it appear that everything is fine.
Then the client calls.
Someone wasn’t enrolled when they should have been. Payroll stopped withholding deferrals. A highly compensated employee received the wrong match. The company bought another business six months ago and forgot to tell anyone. An auditor found something. The Department of Labor sent a letter.
Suddenly, everybody needs an answer immediately.
That isn’t a healthy provider relationship.
Retirement plans operate throughout the year. Businesses hire people, terminate employees, change payroll systems, pay bonuses, acquire companies, sell divisions, change ownership, and modify compensation. Many of those events can affect the retirement plan, but the provider can’t address something it doesn’t know about.
Regular communication is one of the easiest ways to prevent small issues from becoming expensive problems.
That doesn’t mean every client needs weekly meetings. For many plans, a quarterly conversation may be enough. Ask whether ownership changed. Ask whether there were acquisitions. Ask whether payroll practices changed. Ask whether new types of compensation were introduced. Ask whether the workforce changed significantly.
The questions are simple, but they can uncover significant issues.
Providers also shouldn’t assume that silence means the client understands its responsibilities. Most plan sponsors don’t spend their day thinking about ERISA. They are running businesses. The retirement plan is just one responsibility among many.
The provider should create opportunities for communication instead of waiting for a problem to force the conversation.
The best provider relationships aren’t built around emergencies. They are built around enough regular communication that many emergencies never happen.
A client calling only when something goes wrong may seem like a low-maintenance client. In reality, it may simply mean that problems are developing quietly until they become too large to ignore.