(Image: Allison Bell/ALM)
Members of the House Ways and Means Committee voted unanimously Tuesday to pass H.R. 1994, the House version of the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., teamed up with Democratic and Republican colleagues — Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis.; Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas; and Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa. — to introduce the House SECURE Act bill.
Over in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, joined together with Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon — a Democrat — to roll out the Senate companion to the SECURE Act bill.
Given how popular the bills are, how is it possible they won't pass sometime in the next three days?
One challenge could be money.
Members of Congress are supposed to try to keep most bills from increasing the federal budget deficit. In the past, many retirement savings bills with broad, bipartisan support have died after going through the federal budget analysis process, and fights over the budget cuts and revenue increases needed to offsets the retirement savings bills' projected effects.
Here are five things to know about the SECURE Act legislation fight.
1. SECURE Act Legislation Basics
The SECURE Act bills would:
- Create a safe harbor that employers could use when they're choosing group annuity issuers to support 401(k) plan lifetime income stream options.
- Help a plan participant transfer a plan lifetime income feature from one plan to another employer-sponsored retirement plan, or to an individual retirement account (IRA).
- Require plan sponsors to tell the participants about how much monthly retirement income their assets might produce.
- Let people contribute to IRAs even if they are over age 70 1/2.
- Provide a tax credit for a small employer that starts a new retirement plan with an automatic enrollment feature.
- Allow small employers to participate in multiple employer defined contribution retirement plans, or MEPS.
2. The SECURE Act bills have a history.
Many provisions in the new SECURE Act bills come from the Family Savings Act bill, and some from the Retirement Enhancement and Savings Act bills.
The first RESA bill surfaced in Congress in 2016. In late, 2018, Congress appeared to be close to rushing another version of the RESA bill provisions to passage, as part of a must-pass spending bill.
The effort to pass the RESA provisions in 2018 fell through, partly because of concerns about how Congress would compensate for the effects of popular RESA provisions on federal tax revenue.
3. Life and annuity groups like the bills.
The Insured Retirement Institute and the American Council of Life Insurers have already been actively promoting the bill.
