Pay Me Now, or Pay Me Later

Many years ago, there was a commercial (for car oil filters, as I recall) that cautioned, “You can pay me now, or pay me later” – in other words, spend a little now on an oil filter, or pay lots later on to fix the damage done by not doing so. It’s a mantra that I’ve heard employed to encourage retirement savings – but these days it might have a new twist.

We now have a second survey of plan sponsors expressing concern about the impact that switch from the current pre-tax preferences accorded 401(k)s would have on participation.

That member survey by the Committee on Investment of Employee Benefit Assets (CIEBA) found that 78% of the 61 member respondents believed that a switch to an all-Roth system would negatively affect participation rates in their 401(k) plans. In that sense, it roughly mirrored the findings of a survey by the Plan Sponsor Council of America (PSCA) which found that more than three-quarters of the 443 employer respondents to the survey said they strongly agreed with the statement that eliminating or reducing the pre-tax benefits of 401(k) or 403(b) retirement savings plans would discourage employee savings in workplace retirement plans.1

While at least two other employer surveys are reportedly in the field and/or pending release, we (still) don’t know how participants will actually respond. However, it doesn’t require a massive leap of imagination to think that there might be a negative response of some magnitude to the federal government “taking away” the benefit of saving on a pre-tax basis that is, after all, what Section 401(k) of the Internal Revenue Code was all about.

Roth Rising?

Ironically, we find ourselves at a time when the availability of the Roth option in plans is at an all-time high, when providers like T. Rowe Price note that they have seen the biggest one-year increase in Roth contribution offerings in its clients’ 401(k) plans in 2016 – 61% of the plans for which it provides recordkeeping services – while Vanguard notes that two-thirds of the plans it recordkeeps now offer the feature, compared with 49% as recently as 2012.

Now, I realize that there is a difference between having the opportunity to contribute on a Roth basis, and having no option but to contribute on that basis. I’ve no doubt that there are individuals living paycheck-to-paycheck who would find the loss of the here-and-now tax preference to be a hardship. Individuals who, confronted with a Roth mandate, might indeed reduce their retirement savings in order to put food on the table, pay the rent, or put gas in the car so they can get to work.

Those concerns aren’t new, of course. For years they were – and in many cases still are – invoked as reasons to go slow, or go “low” on embracing automatic enrollment. Real as they may be, we also know what that means for retirement security.

Indeed, the surveys that have asked individuals about tax preferences – to the extent they are specific at all – nearly always focus on one particular aspect: deferring current taxes on contributions. The Roth advantages of not paying taxes on the accumulated earnings and the freedom from being forced to take RMDs aren’t even mentioned. Nor do most discussions about post-retirement drawdowns acknowledge that some large chunk of those retirement savings will be due Uncle Sam.

That said, it’s not as though the Roth doesn’t have its own set of tax preferences – and the closer one gets to retirement, the better they look. The odds that tax rates in retirement will be lower, particularly for younger workers, these days seems a quaint notion. Not surprisingly, Vanguard notes that nearly a third (30%) of Roth participants in Vanguard plans were in the age cohort of 34 or younger – and that’s without being defaulted in that direction.

Don’t get me wrong – like most of us, I’d rather have the choice than not. Nor would I diminish the communication challenge ahead if the long-standing 401(k) pre-tax preferences were capped or eliminated.

But of late, every time I see one of those reports about the average 401(k) account balances of those in their 60s, I can’t help but think that somewhere between 15% and 30%, and perhaps more, won’t go toward financing retirement, but will instead go to Uncle Sam and his state and municipal counterparts. And on a frequency dictated by the required minimum distribution schedules of the IRS.

And I can’t help but wonder how many plans for retirement don’t factor in that tax “cut.”

Nevin E. Adams, JD

1.  I draw comfort from the findings in both surveys that very few employers indicate that they would discontinue or diminish their current programs if a shift, full or partial, to Roth would occur.

Here We Go Again ...

What were you doing in 1986?

It was a big year in my life. I got married, hit one of those birthdays with a zero in it, watched my-then hometown Chicago Bears dominate Super Bowl XX, and picked up and moved my new bride (and our menagerie) several hundred miles south to take on a new job heading up a recordkeeping operation.

Before the end of that year, that recordkeeping operation (and, thanks to a recent bank acquisition, the seven different platforms it was running on) would be struggling to understand, implement and communicate a wide array of sweeping changes associated with the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Even though it came during a period when tax code changes (ERTA, TEFRA, DEFRA, REA), were being thrown at us about every 18 months, on average, it’s still difficult to absorb the scope and breadth of the work it took to implement the changes that came with TRA 86.

For all the work that had to go into complying with the new regulatory regimen that came with TRA 86, its real impact would come in the years that followed, via the newly established 402(g) limit (back then we simply called it the $7,000 limit), not to mention the multiple iterations of the nondiscrimination testing that often produced problematic refunds for the highly compensated group. There’s little question that those changes (and others) did what they were designed to do – generate additional tax revenue in the here-and-now by limiting the deferral of taxes.

Yes, the talk is all about tax reform, but the motivation is generally tax cuts, and with a $20 trillion debt, Uncle Sam will need to find some way to offset the projected loss in revenue – and that’s where the tax incentives to establish, fund and contribute to a workplace retirement plan inevitably find themselves in the budgetary crosshairs.

While those paying attention to such things realize that most of those tax preferences are temporary – that is, taxes will be paid on those employer, pre-tax contributions and the earnings thereon when they are withdrawn – the government bean counters look at revenues and expenditures within a 10-year window, and since the payment of most retirement benefits occurs outside that window, the amount of taxes postponed looks, from a budgetary standpoint, to be taxes permanently foregone. And, on that basis, even though the retirement preferences are completely different from other tax deductions, from a budgetary scoring standpoint, it’s a big, juicy target.

We saw what that might mean as recently as 2014 when then-Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) put forth a proposal that would pay for tax reform (or at least some of it) by freezing the COLA limits that apply to defined contribution plans for a decade and limiting the annual ceilings on elective deferrals so that only half could be made on pre-tax basis (weirdly, this would have applied only to employers with more than 100 workers). The first part of the proposal was deemed to raise $63.4 billion in revenue over 10 years, the latter an additional $144 billion, by basically forcing workers who would otherwise have taken advantage of pre-tax savings to pay taxes on those contributions upfront. And let’s not forget that those burdens would have fallen particularly harshly on those who decide to offer these plans in the first place and to match employee contributions.

For those of us who remember 1986 – or perhaps the years in between that and EGTRRA – the references to TRA 86 as a model for Tax Reform 2017 are a bit chilling. Because when it comes to winners and losers in tax reform – and make no mistake, tax reform is all about winners and losers – more often than not, retirement comes out on the short end. And every time it does, it feels more than a little bit like having to bail out your brother-in-law with a loan from your 401(k) – again.

For months now we’ve been talking about tax reform, and the potential implications for retirement policy. It was a focus at this year’s NAPA 401(k) Summit, and it will be front-and-center at this year’s NAPA DC Fly-In Forum. The reason is obvious: If you’re going to lower tax rates and be revenue neutral, the money to offset those tax reductions has to come from somewhere. And traditionally, the tax preferences that foster the growth and expansion of retirement plans and retirement savings have been a “go to” source, perhaps never more so than a generation ago with TRA 86.

The road ahead could be rocky, particularly as it comes in the wake of the application of the Labor Department’s fiduciary regulation, whether delayed or not, and perhaps modified. It’s said that being forewarned is being forearmed, and we’ve certainly worked to do that over the last several months.
If you are not already, you’ll want to stay connected on these issues in the weeks ahead.

Get informed. Get involved. Before it’s too late.

- Nevin E. Adams, JD