ERISA Lessons Learned from Tibble v. Edison

The Supreme Court gives sponsors of 401(k) plans a wake-up call.

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act governs - as its name implies - retirement plans of your employees.  ERISA imposes a duty on fiduciaries to act in the best interest of the plan's participants.  The term "fiduciary" under ERISA includes plan sponsors and decision makers; an employer who sets up a retirement plan for the benefit of its employees is a plan sponsor.  Hence, the employer owes a fiduciary duty to the plan's participants.  If the employer breaches the fiduciary duty, ERISA provides a cause of action against the employer, but the lawsuit must be filed "no more than six years after the date of the last action which constituted a part of the breach or violation . . . ." 29 U.S.C. § 1113.  In legal parlance this is a six-year statute of limitations.  And this leads us to the Supreme Court's 2015 decision in Tibble v. Edison Intern.  Click here to read more:  http://hrprofessionalsmagazine.com/erisa-lessons-learned-from-tibble-v-edison/