At Multnomah Group, our focus is you, the plan sponsor. Our mission is to help clients develop and maintain successful retirement savings programs by providing thorough, practical solutions that meet their objectives. Our role is to impartially assist our clients in developing and monitoring a high-quality plan for their participants. We believe that successful retirement plans are the result of thoughtful plan sponsors making informed and prudent decisions about their plan.
We help our clients prudently monitor all aspects of their plan, including investment managers, recordkeepers, and participant education service providers. We develop objective processes to help clients select recordkeepers and measure the work they provide to the plan and its participants.
Conducting a vendor search can be a detailed, time-intensive process. If the vendor search warrants the selection of a new vendor, the conversion process requires significant planning time and may have a dramatic impact on the participant-user experience. A properly guided vendor search and implementation may result in:
The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) requires retirement plan fiduciaries to ensure that all fees paid out of the retirement plan are reasonable in light of the services rendered. Plan sponsors are not required to purchase services from the lowest bidder, but they must be able to demonstrate a deliberative process by which the reasonableness of applicable fees is regularly considered. The topic of fee reasonableness has become a critical Department of Labor focal point since the late 2000s, making it important for plan sponsors to be able to articulate the process by which fiduciaries conclude that all plan fees are reasonable considering relevant facts and circumstances.
Multnomah Group provides plan specific fee benchmarking analysis to assist our clients in meeting the fee reasonableness standard. We use proprietary market pricing data to estimate the fee range specified in our analysis report.
Our goals in providing the annual fee benchmarking analysis to our clients are as follows:
The most crucial element of any retirement benefit plan is how successfully and efficiently it drives benefits to its participants. Multnomah Group’s consultants and subject matter specialists have a wealth of experience in designing all types of qualified and non-qualified retirement benefit and incentive programs. In our work with clients, we have found the design of the retirement plan to be the primary determinant of a plan’s effectiveness. Unfortunately, many employers choose to focus on the rate and methodology of the employer contribution, while neglecting other factors that have an equivalent impact. Features such as negative enrollment, automatic escalation, and plan leakage affect participant success as much as contribution rate and methodology. We assist plan sponsors in evaluating the design of their plan with a lens focused on all the aspects of design that impact their employee population.
Consultant and Director of Vendor Services
Principal
Principal
Retirement Plan Analyst
Identify, Manage, and Avoid Retirement Plan Vendor ConflictsFiduciaries are required by ERISA to monitor the services providers to their plan. This includes monitoring any conflicts of interest.
Our retirement plan vendor conflicts resources helps you identify, monitor, and avoid any conflicts with your plan's service providers + a worksheet to assist in asking the right questions about potential conflicts.
To download a copy of our conflicts resource guide,
please fill out the form below.