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Remarks of U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L.
Chao
At the Kickoff
Of the Fiduciary Education Campaign
“Getting
it Right—Know Your Fiduciary Responsibilities”
Frances Perkins
Building, Washington, D.C.
May 18, 2004
Good morning. Welcome to the kickoff of the Department’s newest
compliance assistance program: Getting It Right—Know Your Fiduciary
Responsibilities.
I want to thank our partners—the Society for Human Resource
Management, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Institute for Certified
Public Accountants, the National Federation of Independent Businesses and the
Small Business Administration—for their support of this important project.
Strong fiduciary oversight and protecting workers’ benefits are our
highest priorities. Getting it right, however, can be challenging. This is
especially true for small and medium-sized employers who have limited time,
resources and access to professional help with benefit programs.
Today, we are announcing a series of educational seminars to help plan
sponsors understand the rules and meet their responsibilities to workers and
retirees, thereby improving their financial security.
The Department uncovered the need for this kind of program because of
our vigorous enforcement efforts in the health benefits and pension plan areas.
In FY 2003 alone, our enforcement recovered $1.4 billion for employee pension
and health benefit programs.
Compliance assistance is important for retirement plan officials because
ERISA—the law that governs their actions—is one of the more
complicated statutes under our jurisdiction. Our new “Getting It
Right” initiative is a “preventive” program and National Small
Business Week, May 16-22, is a great time to announce this initiative. This new
program is designed to help plan sponsors and fiduciaries avoid
many of the common problems we have identified through our investigations.
Offering a retirement plan can be one of the most rewarding decisions an
employer can make. The employees participating in the plan, their
beneficiaries, and the employer all benefit when a retirement plan is in
place.
However, many employers have not implemented a systematic process to
educate fiduciaries about their responsibilities under ERISA. We have found
that many ERISA fiduciaries are generally not full-time plan fiduciaries. They
have other jobs—for instance, running the company—and may not spend
time daily focusing on their retirement plans. This program offers a helping
hand to those who want to do the right thing, so that the pension plans of
workers will be better protected. That’s the goal of compliance
assistance.
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