Don't you just love it when you have to sign into an online application once a year and only once per year and some government bureaucrat expects you to remember your username, password and a special PIN. The Dept of Labor, through their registration website, assigns you a User ID and PIN. These are assigned to you and not something you get to pick. Heaven forbid that the government would do what every other website in existence does - let you pick your own User ID so you might remember it. Well, welcome to the annual filing of the IRS Form 5500 for your qualified retirement plan. Around our TPA firm this is affectionately referred to as our "Oh Boy, we get to talk to most of our clients again time" since so many clients call for help on forgotten credentials. Hey, being such a friendly TPA firm, we welcome touching base with our clients - we would just rather talk about your kids and grandkids and not recovering your electronic signing credentials.
Had a great conversation with a good client recently. He told me how he spent hours putting all of his passwords into a cloud-base electronic password safe, only to then forget the password to open the safe. Been there! Done that!
When we have finally browbeaten our clients into sending in their annual census and annual plan information questionnaire and then we have done our compliance work and participant accounting, we prepare the IRS Form 5500 (or 5500-SF) and then "invite" our clients via an email to go online and electronically sign the form, hopefully before the applicable deadlines (for a Calendar Year Plan, 7/31 is the deadline often extended to 10/15). "Browbeat" is one of our new favorite words because it has synonyms of "bully, intimidate, force, coerce, compel, hector, dragoon, bludgeon, pressure, tyrannize, terrorize, menace, harass, harry and hound." And that describes what our friendliest and nicest Client Account Managers will do to drag your annual data out of you.
For many, the electronic signing process is confusing but with the help of our great administrators we can help our clients get through the process. This will be the process for all future years, so the person at your firm who is going to electronically sign the form each year needs to make sure they have a record of their User ID, password and PIN. There is a process at the Department of Labor website to retrieve or reset your password if you do happen to forget it or misplace it. The DOL website as of this writing is www.efast.gov.dol. You go there to register for the first time and you go there if you have forgotten your signing credentials. For lost credentials, first you will probably want to recover your assigned User ID (hit Log-In and Forgot User-ID). You are in good shape if you can remember what email you used when you registered and if you can remember the answers to some security question that you picked at registration time. Once you have your User ID, you can then recover your Password by hitting that link on the Log-In Screen. Hey, having been through the recovery process this time, put everything where you can be sure to find it one year from now. You already spend enough time handling your retirement plan - don't punish yourself by spending more time than you have to on this funky little process each year.
If the person who signed or who was going to sign your firm's 5500 leaves your company then you will need to decide who will sign the form in the future and they will have to go through the process of getting their PIN, etc. and you will need to communicate with us so we can email our "signing invite" to the right person. You could ask your ex-employee to do this process for you, but that is probably not what we would call a "best practice" (he says 'tongue-in-cheek' - another interesting phrase - lots of fun to Google these phrases to see how they came about).
We want you to know we really appreciate our clients. Our firm is in its 40th year of existence and we could not have lasted that long without a lot of really wonderful clients. Thanks!
