Hand Benefits Creates New Position for Collective Trusts

Hand Benefits and Trust Company named Martin Campbell to the new position of Senior Consultant Institutional Trust, responsible for collective trust fund sales and consulting.

Hand Benefits, a division of BPAS, provides daily valuation services to collective trust funds for investment management companies, registered investment advisers, 401(k) TPA’s, and other financial institutions. In this new role, Martin will consult with mutual fund companies, registered investment advisers, pension consultants, 401(k) recordkeepers, and bank trust departments to establish 401(k) and retirement plan collective trust funds.  

According to the announcement, Martin was previously a senior product manager with Northern Trust’s Corporate and Institutional Services group where he worked with multinationals and investment managers launching commingled investment vehicles for pension plan investors.

EBSA Cracking Down on Contribution Fraud

The U.S. Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) announced a series of enforcement actions to protect more than $7 million for workers in retirement plans or health plans governed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).

The actions were announced along with the EBSA’s Employee Contributions Initiative, part of the agency’s Contributory Plans Criminal Project. A news release said the Contributory Plans Criminal Project is the agency’s first national criminal enforcement project targeting people who commit fraud and abuse against participants and beneficiaries of contributory employee benefit plans.  

The enforcement cases represent civil cases filed in federal district courts across the country to protect the contributions made by employees and matching contributions promised by their employers. In these cases, workers had contributions to their pension or health plans withheld from their paychecks, but the employers did not deposit those contributions in the plans. Instead, the employers kept the workers’ contributions and used them for their own purposes or other purposes unrelated to the plans, according to the news release.  

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The list of enforcement actions and more information about the Contributory Plans Criminal Project are here.

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