Consumer Agenda for Retirement Security

Initiative #5: Make retirement plans fairer for workers and their spouses

Qualified retirement plans enjoy a tax subsidy, which is weighted to higher-earning employees.The purpose of the tax subsidy is to spur high-income people -- who are either the owners of a business, managerial employees, or others in a position to influence compensation policy -- to encourage their employers to sponsor retirement savings plans so that they can benefit from the tax subsidy. 

Once a plan is in place, however, there are rules to ensure that comparable benefits are provided to rank-and-file employees.  These are called the non-discrimination rules.  These rules are important both substantively, since they are the primary means of helping middle- and lower-income people prepare financially for retirement, and symbolically, by enforcing the policy that financial security in retirement is for everyone, not just the well-heeled.  This idea has been seriously eroded over the last decade and needs restoration.

A. Require 100 percent coverage of all employees in a single line of business.

B. Repeal Social Security integration.

C. Fix non-discrimination rules: end new comparability plans

D. Ensure that participants can rely on written benefit statements.

E. Clarify the effects of phased retirement on participant benefits.

F. Overturn IRS regulations allowing for electronic waiver of important spousal benefits.

G. Protect former spouses of federal workers.

H. Preserve pre-retirement death benefits for surviving former spouses.

Learn more about the other initiatives in the Consumer Agenda for Retirement Security.

Initiative 1: Promote a more adequate and secure private retirement income system.
Initiative 2: Empower workers to promote their own retirement security.
Initiative 3: Improve retirement savings plans.
Initiative 4: Improve traditional and hybrid pension plans.
Initiative 5: Make retirement plans fairer for workers and their spouses.

Print the Consumer Agenda for Retirement Security [PDF].