DES MOINES, Iowa--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

With the deadline for new retirement plan disclosure regulations just around the corner, 89 percent of financial professionals1 say their plan sponsor clients would value more education about plan fees.

The Principal Financial Group has created a comprehensive online resource to help. Assessing Retirement Plan Value offers tips and tools for understanding and evaluating retirement plan fees, services and overall value.

Financial professionals can use the new resource to help clients comply with a key fiduciary obligation: evaluating whether plan fees are reasonable for the services received.

There is more to assessing retirement plan fees than comparing numbers. The better informed plan sponsors are about the services received for those fees, the better equipped they are to make an effective evaluation, said Greg Burrows, senior vice president of retirement and investor services at The Principal. Financial professionals can use our new online resource to help clients evaluate the overall value of the services the plan is receiving and then assess the reasonableness of the fees paid for those services.

The online resource offers:

The Principal also offers a new Fee Reasonableness Review Checklist, a sample template financial professionals can share with plan fiduciaries to help guide them through the evaluation process.

Weve been delivering the required enhanced disclosures to plan sponsors since last year, said Burrows. We wanted to get ahead of the deadlines so there would be no surprises for financial professionals and plan sponsor clients. This new online hub is one more step in ensuring that plan sponsors understand their plan costs and have what they need to fulfill their fiduciary obligations.

The Principal began delivering a redesigned and streamlined summary of fees to new clients in July and existing clients November 1, 2011. Other features from The Principal include:

The Principal also created an ERISA 404(a) Participant Disclosure Regulation Resource Center to assist plan sponsors in complying with the new participant disclosure regulation,

Excerpt from:
New Resource Helps Evaluate Retirement Plan Fees