When to Set Sail with Safe Harbor

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You already know that a 401(k) is a very popular retirement plan and, like other plan designs, it allows your employees to take advantage of tax deferrals on contributions and earnings while their money accumulates for retirement. To enjoy this special status, the IRS put in place rules to assure your plan benefits rank and file employees and not just company owners and highly compensated employees. These are called nondiscrimination rules and there are three tests that must be performed each year to determine whether your plan measures up.

Here they are in a nutshell:

The ADP test – which stands for “Actual Deferral Percentage” looks at how the deferral rate for highly compensated employees compares to that of non-highly compensated employees. Typically, the deferral percent for highly compensated employees can’t be more than two points more than that of the non-highly compensated employees to pass this test.

The ACP test – which stands for “Actual Contribution Percentage” compares employer matching contributions between these two groups.

And the Top-Heavy test – which determines if the account balances of key employees is greater than 60% of the total assets held by the plan.

We know that as a company owner your goal may be to maximize how much you can contribute each year to your retirement. So, to avoid uncertainty about this, you can choose to make additional contributions for your employees in order to get a free pass on these non-discrimination tests. These are called “Safe Harbor” contributions.

You can make a Safe Harbor contribution either through a matching formula or by making a non-elective contribution to all of your employees. Let’s take a quick look at ways to do this:

To satisfy the requirement and encourage plan participation, you may choose to offer a Safe Harbor Match. The Basic Match formula provides a 100% match on the first 3% of deferral compensation, plus a 50% match on deferrals between 3% and 5%.

An Enhanced Match has to be at least as much as the Basic Match at all levels and is typically a match of 100% on the first 4% of deferral compensation.

[Non-Elective Contribution]
Another Safe Harbor option is to make a contribution of at least 3% of annual compensation for all eligible employees. This includes those employees who don’t defer.

A quick note: These Safe Harbor contributions must always be 100% vested. That means that employees can count these contributions in their balances without forfeiture upon termination of employment.

To encourage greater plan participation, the IRS introduced another Safe Harbor option called a Qualified Automatic Contribution Arrangement or QACA for short! It’s a funny name, but it’s become a very popular Safe Harbor design because it encourages more people to save for their future. Here are five quick—but important—things to know about how it works:

1. Your plan must automatically enroll any eligible employee unless they choose to opt out.
2. Employee deferrals start automatically at a minimum of 3% of compensation unless they change this, and this rate increases 1% each year until it reaches at least 6%.
3. The plan must also include a qualified default investment for employees who don’t make an investment election on their own.
4. The matching contribution formula for a QACA Safe Harbor Plan is a 100% match on the first 1% of compensation deferred and a 50% match on deferrals between 1% and 6%. [3.5% total]
5. And, unlike other safe harbor options, the match can be subject to a 2-year cliff vesting schedule. That means if an employee leaves the company inside of two years, they forfeit the match back to the plan.
   This plan design encourages automatic enrollment and automatic increases to put more people on a savings path and gives employers more flexibility as well.

Adopting a Safe Harbor provision can help your plan in four important ways:

• It can potentially reduce plan maintenance costs by eliminating annual nondiscrimination testing requirements
• It allows you and other highly compensated employees to maximize your deferral to the annual limit
• It relieves your plan’s potential top-heavy status, and
• The matching or nonelective contributions represent additional competitive benefits to help recruit and retain employees

We encourage you to get in touch with us if you’d like to learn a little more about how Safe Harbor options can help make your plan more successful.

The TRPC sales consultant in your region can be reached at the phone number or email address below: