Practice

The Department of Labor estimates that automatic enrollment in 401(k) plans, as protected under the Pension Protection Act, will add between $45 billion to $90 billion a year to the plans, which had $3.6 trillion in assets under management in 2006, according to the Investment Company Institute.

With a new Internal Revenue Service requirement about to require 403(b) sponsors to assume fiduciary duty, much as 401(k) sponsors do, and pare back the number of offerings, the sponsors are inevitably going to scrutinize their plan administrators.

The Pension Protection Act ushered in far-reaching changes to 401(k) plans, including fiduciary protection for providers using automatic enrollment and default investments, and making permanent higher contribution levels and catch-up contributions for older workers.

Implementing automatic enrollment and auto-escalation in 401(k) plans is a start in the effort to push employees to prepare for retirement, but it may not be enough.

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed two bills that would prevent lawsuits against mutual and pension funds that divest holdings in companies that are doing business in Darfur and Iran.

Globalization may be coming in baby steps. In the effort to move to a single, universal financial reporting standard, the Securities and Exchange Commission voted unanimously last month to open for public comment a proposal to allow U.S. companies-including investment companies-to use International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) for their SEC filings, rather than U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).

Relaxation of Sarbanes-Oxley audit and reporting rules passed unanimously by the Securities and Exchange Commission last month may address the burdensome compliance costs of the law that companies-especially small ones-complained about, but it probably won't be enough to reverse the small-cap slide.

Workers are starting to catch on to all the ominous warnings of what will happen if they don't save enough for retirement, and the average 401(k) account increased 17% in 2006 from the previous year.

While we will certainly give credit to Eliot "The Steamroller" Spitzer for taking on illicit trading and sales activities in the mutual fund industry while he was New York attorney general, we wondered why, when he was running for governor, he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from hedge funds, which, after all, were at the heart of the scandal. It's entirely possible some of the funds that showered Spitzer with money conducted market timing or late trading. That would make his acceptance of their contributions a serious conflict of interest and, possibly, a tacit agreement not to indict them.

Citigroup's Smith Barney division has agreed to pay $50 million to settle market-timing charges by the New York Stock Exchange and New Jersey regulators. Of the $50 million total, $40 million will go to investors who were harmed by the activity.