Pension Distribution Answer Book

Pension Distribution Answer Book, 2024 Edition, provides expert guidance on the complex rules governing pension plan distributions. This comprehensive and easy-to-use resource guides the subscriber through the labyrinth of legal, administrative, and tax requirements for all types of distributions from qualified retirement plans.
Highlights of the 2024 Edition include:

- Changes made by the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 (SECURE 2.0 Act) to inservice distribution rules, including penalty-free withdrawals for certain emergency expenses, domestic abuse, terminal illness, and disaster recovery, and the new three-year repayment period for qualified birth or adoption distributions

- New permanent loan rules under the SECURE 2.0 Act for qualified individuals who have sustained economic losses due to federally declared qualified disasters

- Recognition, under the SECURE 2.0 Act, of qualified domestic relations orders issued by Tribal courts

- Changes made to the required minimum distribution (RMD) rules by the SECURE 2.0 Act, including: the increase in the age used to determine a participant's required beginning date; the removal of RMD barriers for life annuities; new rules for qualifying longevity annuity contracts; elimination of the penalty on partial annuitization; the reduction in the excise tax rate for failures to receive RMDs; the elimination of pre-death RMD requirements for Roth plan accounts; new rules permitting a surviving spouse to elect to be treated as the deceased participant; and the modification of RMD rules for special needs trusts

- Proposed Regulations from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that would modify the participant election rules to permit alternatives to the physical presence requirement for spousal consents

- The SECURE 2.0 Act's exemption of certain in-service distributions from the 10 percent additional income tax on early distributions, and reduction of the excise tax rate for failures receive RMDs

- The SECURE 2.0 Act's directives to the Treasury Secretary to simplify and standardize the rollover process by issuing sample forms for direct rollovers, and to the General Accountability Office to report to Congress on the effectiveness of the Code Section 402(f) rollover notice

- The SECURE 2.0 Act's expansion of the self-correction program under the Employee Plans Compliance Resolution System for eligible inadvertent failures, new guidance on the recovery of plan overpayments, and the permanent safe harbor for correcting employee elective deferral failures occurring with respect to automatic enrollment and automatic escalation features; and IRS Notice 2023-43, providing interim guidance on the self-correction of eligible inadvertent failures under Section 305 of the SECURE 2.0 Act

- The IRS has stated in Notice 2023-54 that when the proposed section 401(a)(9) regulations are finalized, annual distributions will be required under the 10-year rule for RMDs